The Household COO

After reading PL’s post on “On Love After Three Years“, I was inspired to write my story.

On Love After One and  a Half Years

When we first met, we barely noticed each other. He thought I was rude and I saw another non-climber that I wasn’t interested in. Our circles collided ever so briefly only because we had one common friend - one of his drinking buddies, one of my climbing buddies.

We met on and off for a year with little more than a polite “hello” and “goodbye”. We were acquaintances more than friends until the fateful night when we were thrown into each other’s company by accident or perhaps by our mutual friend’s cunning. The three of us talked our way into the night and I discovered an entertaining conversationalist. He was not at all like I had assumed and I am sure I was also not quite what he had expected.

In retrospect, he was a perfect match for the old me – the hopeful, idealistic teenager – a person I was convinced I could never be again. The person he met was carefree and uncontrolled - a vagrant, drifting rock climber that made it her sole purpose in life not to care about anyone or anything. A friend once told me that that had been a period of my life where I was trying to relive the years of a missed “teenage rebellion”.

Always the well-behaved daughter, I never knew what it was like to let my hair down, to go wild, to throw all responsibility to the winds and to let people dislike me. It was always about straight A’s, my reputation, the perfect daughter and what other people would think. To be finally free of the brand that marked everything that I never wanted to be was a heady and intoxicating feeling. Drunk and hell-bent on being reckless, I chased the bohemian lifestyle, promising myself that I would never again be controlled as I was, and that meant never letting anyone matter to me. This was me, warts and all, and it was this or the high road.

Personally, I felt that it was a phase of my life I went through because I was lost. A culmination of experiences led me onto the road to nowhere. I didn’t know where I was going or what I wanted out of life. I was purposeless and life was meaningless.  Yet I was forced to continue the drudgery of life with haunted eyes. I shunned all the people who might have cared for me because relationships were a complex matter I didn’t want to deal with. In a strange paradoxical way, I enjoyed the monotony of my uncomplicated life even as I was intensely bored of it.

I would walk into relationships looking for the back door until I grew tired of the games. I decided that isolation was better than the stress of putting on the shackles of a relationship so that I could find a way to be emancipated again. I told myself that I could do without the company of a man and so I lived until the loneliness became too much to bear and I yearned for companionship in spite of myself.

On the suggestion of a friend I decided to try a fling – a concept that I had never believed in because I felt that it hurt people. Whether fate intended it that way or not, it had been the moment when I decided to entertain a casual relationship that I met him again on that fateful night. Everything I knew about him told me that this man was “for keeps”, he was the wrong material for a fling, but I went ahead with the relationship intending to end it well before the six month mark.

When I look back, I often wonder why he didn’t walk away. I was, as the character Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy described it, broken and damaged. I think that is why I find the series so captivating – not because it is set in a hospital but because of the manner in which they explore human relationships. It is because the character Christina reminds me of the “me” I had been when I first started dating my husband.

But I digress… I asked him once what was it he saw in me that prompted him to give “us” a chance and his reply was, “I saw a flower but I didn’t know whether it was blooming or dying and I wanted to see which it was.” To this day, I think he believes that he saw a flower that was blooming. The truth is the flower was dying but he brought a watering can and sunlight.

It hasn’t always been a garden of sweet smelling roses. Some days it feels like we have a one-way ticket headed for a disaster. I often wonder how I could marry a person who makes me so mad until the blood in my veins is broiling. Then I remember what a friend once told me – that “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference”. That he can make me feel such powerful emotions, albeit negative ones, is not a sign that we are over. The day it is over is the day that I feel nothing.

Another friend once said something along these lines, “true happiness comes when you accept suffering,” although I think he stole this wise adage from Buddha. I guess in order to know the times when you are truly happy, you need to be aware of all the times when you are deeply unhappy because the presence of a negative helps us to recognise the positive. Yes, in an uncanny way, it is like saying good cannot survive without evil.

What was true of me, which I think is true of many people is that we go through this world living like we don’t deserve happiness and so we shun it every time it comes knocking on our door. I guess I was lucky that it came banging on my door this time around.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 6:38 pm and is filed under love, partner, relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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