Behind Closed Doors
Yesterday I stepped onto the elevator in the midst of a conversation. The two other riders were talking about love--big, heavy, real love. Said one, "I've never felt so emotionally involved before. With [current boyfriend] everything's a huge deal, and stuff that didn't matter with [ex-boyfriend] is suddenly major drama." Knowing a thing or two about the background of the current boyfriend--and having seen the stress and tears he's caused--I guessed that my coworker wasn't talking about all the good love stuff that comes with a serious relationship, but about the bad love stuff--the stuff that hurts so much you feel like your insides are being sucked into a black hole at the center of your chest.
My coworker went on: "I just don't know what to do because I've never felt this before. My sister felt it with her boyfriend, my mom feels it with her current boyfriend, Leah felt it when she was thirteen years old," she said, referring to this guy. Yes, it was clear now: she was talking about relationship angst--the kind of angst that had her sister in deep depression, her mother sobbing into her whiskey, and me writing about it on my blog more than a decade later.
The more she talked, the clearer it became that she was equating that severe, all-consuming, obsessive broken-heart pain with captital-T True capital-L Love. Perhaps that's why she's still with [current boyfriend], even though he's not only unstable and involved in various illegal activities (the first time Simon and I met him, he turned around at a party, saw us there, and decided to enlighten us to the unsurprising fact that selling drugs is bad because it'll land you in jail, and he knows because he's been there and it sucked, and then he introduced himself and shook our hands), but what's worse is that he's not even nice to her most of the time.
I understand the logic that might make a person believe that the level of angst she feels in a particular relationship must be some indication of how deep the emotions go and how important the object of her affections is. Makes sense; if you didn't care for the person, none of that stuff matters. But since when does the level of love get measured exclusively by how low the lows are? Whatever happened to being with someone because they made you happy? And even if the heights of the highs are inversely proportional to the depths of the lows, shouldn't those two extremes be splitting you 99/1, or at least 60/40? Or at least leaning a little more to the good than to the bad?
Here and there on the internet, whenever someone blogs about having relationship trouble, there seems to be at least one commenter in the bunch who says, "Thank you for your honesty and showing us some of the not-so-great parts about your marriage. A lot of people pretend like everything is wonderful all the time, and it's so obvious that they're lying because no one's relationship is like that." While I can understand where that comes from (people are usually talking more about themselves than about others when they make statements like that), I can't help but be a little offended that someone out there might think I'm creating a rose-tinted, fictionalized version of myself and my life here. But the fact is that I don't write about the fights and the yelling and the soul-crushing unsurity between me and Simon because it doesn't exist. WYSIWYG.
While I was growing up, my homelife was as much like a sitcom as it could be without either a studio audience or a laugh track or an alien puppet in a Hawaiian shirt. When I went to school and hung out with my friends and they all looked, talked, and acted like me, I only assumed their lives outside of school were also similar to mine. It was only later that I realized a lot of those kids weren't coming from LeaveItToBeavervilles but from places where moms hit and dads didn't come home and creepy uncle Chesters didn't always sleep on the couch where he belonged. But if they acted mostly happy and fine and well-adjusted and "normal" at school--just like I did--what did they suspect was going on behind my normal-looking family's normal-looking front door?
It doesn't do much good to speculate about what people might think of me from whatever information they can glean, either from this website or at work or even just walking down the street. We can't help but see the world through the filter of our own unique experiences, and until someone invents an adapter that will connect our brains directly to our computer screens--or to other peoples' brains--the only full story we'll ever know is our own. Everyone's history is different, everyone's brain chemistry is different, not everyone wants the same thing in love, or in life. That's why I got off the elevator with nothing more than a smile and a nod.
It’s hard to read the ‘love hurts, it takes work’ attitude of the blogsphere and not start to believe it a little, wondering when the shoe will drop in my relationship with my husband.
We’ve been together three years and it hasn’t even come close. Thanks for being someone to identify with.
Our marriage is so NON-dramatic/turbulent/etc....and I wouldn't want it any other way.
:)
Our relationship lacks drama. We've put up with it for 5 years now!
I've known people in my life who just couldn't handle relationships without drama. They didn't know how to be just happy and contented; there always had to be some kind of problem or issue or a fight or whatever. I grew up with parents like that and said "no thanks" to Serious Relationship Angst.
As someone who didn't grow up in a picture perfect home and has had some unhealthy relationships in my past, my marriage is blissfully "boring" and drama-free! *happy sigh*
Having been in both kinds of relationships - the It Hurts So Much It Must Be True Love kind and the Hope I Don't Make People Barf or Think I'm Smug About The Fact That We Have No Big Problems Whatsoever kind - I have no doubts about which one I prefer!
Of course you know that stable, loving relationships exist and that they can flourish year after year, because your parents had/have one. I have one, but I didn't come from one. I went through my share of crappy boyfriends before I decided that I didn't want to end up like my mother, in a loveless and emotionally/psychologically damaging marriage for 38 years and counting. I've been with my husband since I was 20. That's almost 16 years. I love him more with every passing year. I'm blissfully, stupidly happy when I'm with him.