Beyond Romance

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We thought of ourselves as enlightened people. The idea had been to go forward into life side by side, facing outward, at the world, but now we found that we faced only inward, each toward the ignorant other. Slowly, the relationship that was meant to serve our lives became our life. The more uncertain we grew the more we protested that love was everything. Nothing, we said, was to come between us and our love. We two would be as one. That was the norm. Deviation from the norm could only unnerve and unsettle.

This policy did not take us to the promised land; it led us further out into the desert. Neither of us, it seemed, was to be allowed an independent impulse. It became habitual for one or the other to complain regularly, "How can you say you love me and want to do that?" Inevitably, what either he or I had wanted to do that so outraged the other was to gratify an interest that served only our own separate selves, a desire the other experienced as excluding and therefore disloyal. But the restriction went against nature: The impulse kept surfacing, like a weed pushing up through concrete.

Grieving over failed intimacy (the shock and the abnormality of it), we found our unhappiness shameful (here we were, married and more alone than when we were alone). Shame isolates. The isolation was humiliating. Humiliation does not bear thinking about. We began to concentrate on not thinking.

The more troubled our attachment became the more time we spent in each other's company. We were always together. It wasn't that we enjoyed being together, not at all, it was simply that we could not bear to be apart. Together, we generated tension, but alone we each fell into an intense loneliness. The loneliness was more painful than the tension, to be avoided at any cost. Eventually, if I said I was going to the store for a container of milk, my husband said he'd walk along with me. The people we knew--they were all as young as us--said, Look how devoted they are. Marriage taught me that anxiety looks like devotion and that loneliness is the human condition that most rejects easy analysis.

The obsession with avoiding ourselves became degrading. Our own emotions were now the enemy. A protective shell grew up around all feeling. When this shell thickened, the flesh at the center shriveled. Young and healthy, I felt buried alive.

I remember lying in bed that first morning staring up at the small square of bedroom ceiling. I remember the sunny silence and the bliss I felt at not having to respond to anyone. Peace, utter peace: the shadows gone, the anxiety cleared out. What remained was open space. My presence filled the tiny apartment. I stood naked in the middle of the room. I yawned and I stretched. The idea of love seemed an invasion. I had thoughts to think, a craft to learn, a self to discover. Solitude was a gift. A world was waiting to welcome me if I was willing to enter it alone. I put on my clothes and walked through the door.

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