You couldn’t let me love you. Not the way I wanted to, needed to. And it could go without saying that you couldn’t love me that way either. (But it had to be said.) For I wanted to place you on a pedestal worthy of the more perfect relationship I desired. I wanted you to be the object and ideal of my love: sharing life, a spirit, ourselves, selflessly giving, intimately sharing. I wanted too much, of course.
Your responses and mine were often short of the relationship I was sure I wanted and thought I needed. Still, you usually wanted to be with me or, more likely, wanted me to be with you. Sometimes, it was just the sad old game: wanting what you can’t have, losing interest in what you can, a hole not easily filled. But most often, our relationships were made of more earnest stuff than that.
Still, I wanted to love more about you, and more of the life that contained you. But that is just not the way things are most often ordered, not the way the game—and so often it seems just that—is played. Left to our own devices, we are not capable of the love we think we want, not capable of accepting it, returning it, sharing it, or dealing with it. Oh, we deny the fact when confronted with it, we reconstruct and reinterpret it, we rationalize and spiritualize it, but it remains nonetheless true. When it comes to love in our relationships, there is rather more a relative, uneven and selfish quality to the reciprocity allotted or allowed.
I often thought it was I who cared more about you than you about me. It was I who was more patient and tried more to understand, I who more often made excuses for you or forgave you. I enjoyed and appreciated you more, wanted more often to be together, felt more right and whole when we were, more incomplete when we were not. I was the one who found it easier to sacrifice for you, to place you first and myself second. That’s just how it seemed to me.
But, more likely, mine was an imperfect, self-centered view. More likely, I was wrong. Perhaps I really didn’t know how to love you in that way any more than you knew how to love me. Is it possible that I was as much the impatient, demanding or prideful one, the jealous or possessive one? Was I as much the one too easily hurt, too willing to count myself wronged, too ready to give up and slip away, to abandon the possibilities of relationship? Was I as much the petulant one, the presumptuous one, whose expectation was a singular level of accommodation and attention? Were my responses to your expectations of me—approval, patience, caring, empathy, forgiveness, joy, excitement, even love—just as often measured and extended with calculation?
When was it that I could finally see? How long did it take? It was years or more, I think, before I could see that I was failing you—and just as much, just as culpably—as you were failing me. (That too had to be said.) Perhaps my ideal could be realized only if our common life, our interests, persons and things shared—and the calendar and clock for sharing—were most often mine. Our life was to be my life, our interests were also to be mine, and if there was a common character or spirit, it too was to be more mine. The sharing was more you with me, than I with you. It was all about me—at least to the same extent it seemed to me to be all about you.
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It did’t matter who you were: a first love, a passing, but passionate love, a life-long love. In another way, you could also have been a filial or brotherly love, a good friend or best friend. It doesn’t matter on which side of the male-female, yin-yang, right brain-left brain dichotomies our relationships fell; they were too often more about emptying boxes than filling them.
And in yet another sense there were the ideas, ideals, aspirations and institutions I encountered and embraced. Attending them were the ways and wiles of the world, the good and evil that called me: the promises and deceptions, moods and measures, joys and sufferings, the conflicting values and gods to be served. One after another, more of these worldly siren songs, the aspirations, successes and attachments, became as cul de sacs, more limiting and less satisfying than I expected and wanted them to be.
As to the relationships, we sometimes worked through it all, but often did not—you going in your new direction, I in mine. Too often it all just became more unsatisfying than you or I could comfortably abide--one or the other of us unable or unwilling to give or forego what was necessary to fulfill the other's needs or expectations. Still, there were personal or shared comforts, relational breakthroughs, even sublime moments—or at least the companionship and aspirations of a shared place and purpose. There was still much to be grateful for.
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It’s all just more of those life things, I guess—just the way we are wired, the way we are ordered. An evolutionary, genetic thing, but also a learned thing. A self-interested, even selfish thing, but also a self-protective thing. Eventually, all that remains to us is openness to a transcendent perspective and the possibility of an unknown but greater purpose. But a perspective that transcends us and our relationships is not an easy thing to grasp. Behavior consistent with that perspective--living it--is harder still. Trusting others or a new perspective with our wellbeing is hardest of all. (Too often that behavior is misunderstood or the trust misplaced.)
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But after it all, is it possible they may still have been just the right relationships, just the right experiences for me—the right set of difficult, sometimes ironic challenges and failings, just the ones I needed to love me or engage me in those flawed, very human and worldly ways? As if there were a twisted, indiscernible but wonderful purpose, it somehow seems the uneven, even mismatched relationships were prescribed and in turn fashioned me into the person I had to be, the person I was intended to be.
After it all, in fact, I felt as if I were led and sometimes pushed to a transcendent sense of myself and the relationships, circumstances and contexts of my life. I felt pointed in a different, unknown direction. And there, wherever that might lead, I might love as I needed to love because I would be loved in that way. There I might be more forgiving than I had earlier been inclined, more gentle and compassionate though my nature once objected, more humble, more selfless than my sense of identity previously allowed. It’s as if by some arcane, counter-intuitive calculus, for some esoteric purpose—could it be?—they were anonymous gifts to me.
First written: May 2006
© Gregory E. Hudson 2007
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