A convergence of events has me thinking about romantic relationships a lot lately. Old ones, new ones, potential ones, hypothetical ones, ending ones, evolving ones, aching ones, scabbed-over ones, nostalgic ones, et cetera.

I live with someone who is still in the early stages of mourning the loss of her husband. When she speaks of him, and their love, their family, the life they built together, and the terrible absence his death left, which she describes as being completely and utterly worse than losing her parents (a prospect that already seems worse than anything I can imagine), I can physically feel the reverberations of her suffering in my own body.

I’ve never felt so sure about the truth of this Faulkner quotation, which I’ve posted before:

“I know the answer to that and I know that I can’t change that answer and I don’t think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.” — The Wild Palms

You never get it cheap. Even if you’re the one to die first, you might have to watch the person who loves you the most watch you die, which might very well be even more horrible. But as horrific as the combination of love and mortality is, it also seems utterly right. I have rarely sat across a table from a crying person and felt so sure that her crying, her pain, her suffering is absolutely appropriate, even beautiful, a true reflection of her love, not something that ought to be fixed or corrected or medicated away or hidden. I also feel like I have learned a vast amount about relationships and romantic love in general just from observing someone else’s grief, and I honestly feel grateful for that, as if I have glimpsed some sacred treasure well before my time.

In the midst of her suffering, my friend insists that it is of the utmost importance that I find someone to share my life with whose eventual death will hurt me just as badly as she’s hurting, someone who sees things the way I see them, who really cares. Even in worst kind of pain she’s ever felt, she says that the alternatives, of either going through life alone or with a person she didn’t have that kind of connection with (and she thinks many marriages fall into that category), are more unthinkable.

It’s really changing the way I think about dating, and it’s making me look back over my own relationship history with different eyes, and really think about what it is I’m looking for in the long-term.

I’m also rethinking The Rules. Yes, I really have read the actual book, prompted by an experience several years ago in which someone I dated for only a month or two, about whom I had gotten really worked up, literally disappeared into thin air and stop returning my calls. (This was the first time I had experienced this relatively common event in the New York dating scene.) As embarrassing as that is to admit (not to mention that one of the The Rules is never to admit that you’ve read or practiced The Rules!), it’s also true that the basic principle behind it all is more or less right. People are just plain more attractive when they seem unattainable, and the more someone pulls away from you, up to a point, the more you want to be near them. This is, I think, just a result of how our egos function. At some hidden (or not so hidden) level, most of us think that we are great and desirable. So, if someone else seems to think that we are actually not that great, we then think that they must be even more great and desirable than we are. Why else wouldn’t they appreciate our greatness and thus be scrambling to be near us all the time?

The Rules are sortof right, and they sortof work, sometimes, particularly in cases where you actually are too busy to see your romantic interest often and not just playing some hard-to-get game. But in light of this grief I’ve observed, they also seem just utterly ridiculous. I mean, seriously? This matter of romantic love is incredibly important. What on earth are we all doing, going out there and playing games with one another’s hearts and messing around and not telling the truth about our feelings and choosing to be involved with people who blatantly abuse us or with whom there is only some tiny microscopic chance of things ever “working out” and all the million other things that go on in dating life all the time? Why are we all so scared of being rejected, when getting rejected is absolutely inevitable in an endeavor in which we are basically tasked with sorting through everyone in the world to find the one or two people (if we’re lucky) with whom we can share this particular type of love?

If I actually thought I had to solve this problem using reason or my ego alone, I probably would have given up a long time ago.

I am seventeen. I am powerwalking around my small Southern town listening to Alanis Morissette on my walkman. It is summer and I know every word and I am screaming along. I am so in love, so in love. One day it will be raining and I will be on my knees with a boy in a construction sight between piles of boards, my cheeks flushed and my heart pounding, this is it, this is it, this is the answer to everything. I loved so hard, I pulled so hard, I thought nausea was chemistry and I was ready to suffer anything, I was never going to give up, I wanted to experience everything. I was quiet and reserved but I wanted to do it all, I wanted to go and go and go further and further into, I wanted to become, I wanted to merge.

. . .

You say, What do you want? What do you feel? What do you want? What do you feel? What do you hope for? What can I do? You never tell me, you never talk, you never say. I want back, I want forth, I want conversation, I want words. Anything, anything, just say anything, so I can imagine, so I can know, what is going on. What is going on in here? What is going on with you? What is it like, for you, when I touch you? I love you, but I do not long for you when you are not here. I do not feel passionate about you. I have to have that. I would rather be alone than not have that. I would rather never have children than not have that. You worry too much, you are too afraid, you are not like me, you are not calm. The children might not be like me. You think everything is a disaster. It would have been perfect except for this. It could have worked except for that. This is the moment the world ended.

Kick in the face, sword in the heart. I see my body pierced all over with arrows and I won’t speak, I can’t speak. I think you are wrong but what can I do, what can I say, you can’t make someone love you more, you can’t trick them. You can’t pull them into it, no matter how hard you pull and how deep you suck them inside. You can hug and you can scratch and you can say feed me, feed me, feed me, on every breath, please help me, please help me, as the tears come and come and come.

But our touch is electric, but you give me back my body, but you give me my eyes, you give me my breath, and when I touch your skin my skin becomes porous, and I can feel you so clearly I can feel the whole world, and I can say I do not exist. I can say I do not exist and it is the most joyful seeing.

My hands move around in slow motion, the air is thick, I feel pin pricks all over my body and the light seems to be pulsating off the objects, and the objects are my body and my breath, and you, you are spasming from all my pulling and I am breathing so deeply I can feeling it going out of me and into you and out of you and into me and and and I am not wanting, I am not wanting anymore I

it is alright it was always alright if love does not feel passion for me it is alright because we are together already, we have already created a child, we have already had our marriage, it has happened, it is happening, because I can feel it, the entire future, right now, and you were with me, all along, you were with me when I wouldn’t talk to you, and you with me when you were betraying me, when I was betraying you, you were with me when I was falling in the desert, all the times I fell in the desert, face in the dust, all the times I followed, and pulled, and wanted more, and wanted love, and wanted someone to hurt me so I could feel it, and wanted someone to erase me so I could be reborn, and wanted to to merge

you were with me when I cried at the reading of the Passion, and wept at the altar, and looked at bread in such a way that I could see flesh and feel the sword in my side and the thorns and the whip I held in my own hand and the vinegar and the light and the darkness together. all the children are molested by the image of their savior and this cup holds such horror that cannot be said. I will drink it and I will love you who does not love me and our children will be beautiful.

[This passage from Margery Williams'The Velveteen Rabbit has been a favorite since my mother read it to me as a child, and the older I get, the more impossible it becomes to read through it without sobbing. I'm both proud (because it further confirms how wonderful they are) and annoyed (because I didn't think of it myself) that my newly-married friends Meggy and Chris had this read at their July 18th wedding.]

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does is hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Also, Meryl Streep reads the Velveteen Rabbit.