Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun?

Once upon a time I had mused on the topic of the initial courting period. I said you can’t believe who a person is, or rather presents, during the first 6 months. We’re all on our best behaviour. There’s no farting, no real scratching of any body parts that aren’t publicly sheathed, and there’s an internal sensor diagnosing what should be said and filtering what absolutely should not. Sure, we fall in love, but in the end is it the real person we’re falling in love with or is it the illusion that person created? We created.

It’s exhausting.

I’ve just recently found someone. I admittedly placed an ad in the mega online dating service. The way I phrased my profile I thought I’d get... well, I don’t know who I’d get. He was my first contact. My first. My high school lover. My favourite flavour. And things went well... eventually. And now he means something.

I fucking hate this.

Why do I think he’s going to break up with me at any moment? I get nervous and paranoid if he hasn’t emailed me by a certain time. Yes, of course he has work he needs to do. It’s fantastic knowing there are other people in his life that he needs tending to. My rational mind fully comprehends that. My irrational mind is often wondering, “Did I say something wrong in my last email? Was there something I did or said that could make him change his mind about me?”

Perhaps the reason for our need for perfection is if we feel perfect, flawless, we will be rendered lovable. If we are less than perfect how can we be loved? We find it so easy to love and forgive our friends when they are painfully, endearingly and beautifully flawed. Why is it so difficult for ourselves?

Maybe it’s from being scared of needing someone. I’m 35 years old. I’m supposed to be a big girl now. I should have a career. I should have a car still. I should still own a house. But I don’t anymore. I gave all those things up, including the big girl, when I left my marriage. I should be able to do it on my own. That’s what the ads say. They don’t play Double Mint gum commercials anymore, where pleasure and fun were amplified when in pairs. There’s now a societal pull towards self-sufficiency, I-am-Woman-hear-me-meow mentality where the image of strength within femininity is wearing very powerful lingerie and using giant cans as a weapon of mass affectation.

How do I tell him he feels like home when he holds me?

There’s so much that new love stirs up. The two people in question become mirrors to each other. In the beginning you can see what that other person sees in you: that perfect creature you’ve always wanted to be and sometimes convince yourself you are. The problem is maintaining perfection is an unachievable illusion.

We create things, but if they don’t stand the test of time or technology we scrap it, forgetting the path which took us there and in the end abandoning all and ourselves. We become embarrassed by our past. “We were young and stupid”, we worldly surmise over a luscious cocktail... or nine. We berate ourselves, relinquishing process for product where the final end result had better be fucking good and we’d better have something bling to show for it.

When one has been in a serious, long term relationship (I’d been married for 7 1/2 years), we often end up resenting the other person mostly because we have felt like we’d been taken advantage of. We too had also taken advantage. We know they’re going to be there at the end of the day. We know that as soon as dinner is ready we’re going to head for our appointed stations in front of the television, yet again captivated by an episodic Frasier Crane doing a repeat performance, studio audience’s canned laughter, cold comfort. We say we hate it when we’re in a relationship where one day repeats itself over and over again. A glitch in the Matrix. Not even a glitch, it’s more like a master reel someone inserts; a cinematic day-in-the-life scenario that is rewound and replayed ad infinitum. One’s life amounting to nothing more than edited dailies, eventually understanding fully how there is no greater loneliness than the lonely felt while being with a partner.

So we move on (give up?) when the going gets boring and there’s no sign of hope or light. We resolve to take this new knowledge, the stuff we don’t want, into the next relationship. But where does that leave us? Being a bunch of spoiled kids with miniscule attention spans never fully understanding the sacrifice and potential payoff of total commitment? Or in search of true love? I don’t know.

What I do know is when I look at the new one it’s absolutely exhilerating. When he holds me it feels like home. He’s careful and considerate. He’s flawed. He’s marvellous. But falling in love with someone new really makes you examine all the bits of yourself that you just relaxed into and didn’t really care about because there had already been someone who claimed loved you, knew you, even when you didn’t feel you were getting the kind of love you wanted or hoped you deserved.

I think I’m just scared of the response. What if my feelings aren’t reciprocated? I know I should remember that Donald Kaufman line from Adaptation, “You are what you love, not what loves you”, but it feels like such a huge risk. I don’t really think the odds are against me. I just never realised how chicken I can be. Love’s making me question everything. Myself. My surroundings. The way I’ve been living my life up until now. I feel like a death-defying tight-rope walker with no balancing rod, just an empty, cavernous pit below me.

But I do see his smile. The safety net.