I missed her

I’ve been wondering lately if maybe I’m just not relationship material.

This has been one of those thoughts that wanders into my head uninvited, eats everything in the refrigerator and refuses to leave.

Maybe I’m simply better alone.

Maybe I missed some essential relationship gene.

Maybe after all these years I should finally admit that I’m incapable of doing the thing everybody else seems determined to do, which is locate another human being and slowly combine two lives until nobody remembers whose Tupperware is whose.

And then this morning I thought:

What a crock of shit.

I’m perfectly capable of love.

I’ve loved deeply, loyally, stupidly, extravagantly, inconveniently and occasionally well beyond the point where any sensible person would have gathered up her belongings and called an Uber.

Love has never been my problem.

For a while I even had this lovely metaphor going about thinking somebody else was my lifeguard and eventually learning how to swim for myself.

Fuck the lifeguard. She can go supervise the kiddie pool.

I don’t need another metaphor about somebody saving me. I’m done making somebody else the central character in a story about discovering myself.

Maybe the question isn’t whether I’m capable of love.

Maybe the question is whether I’m still willing to trade freedom for belonging.

And I don’t think I am.

That feels different.

Because I like love. Love is terrific. I highly recommend it. I’m just increasingly suspicious of the enormous administrative apparatus we’ve built around it.

Apparently once you love somebody, there are meetings.

There are schedules.

There are negotiations about dinner.

There are discussions about where you are going, when you will be back, who else will be there, what you are doing Thursday, what “we” are doing next month and whether the thermostat really needs to be at 70.

At some point love apparently acquired middle management.

I don’t want to merge anymore.

I don’t want to be half of anything. And I sure as hell don’t need somebody to complete me. I have spent seventy-six years assembling this particular contraption. Some of the parts are original, some have been replaced, several are held together with profanity, and the warranty expired sometime during the Carter administration.

But I am complete.

I am not, however, finished.

That distinction has become enormously important to me.

Complete does not mean done.

I have no idea who I’m going to be next year. I don’t know what I’m going to become obsessed with next, what I’m going to stop believing, what I’m going to write, where I’m going to go, what ridiculous project will suddenly become absolutely essential, or which conviction I currently hold will eventually make me slap my forehead and say, “Jesus, Kathi.”

I love that.

I’m seventy-six years old and I am still curious as hell.

Maybe more curious than I have ever been.

And curiosity requires room.

I want to wake up wondering about something and spend half the day following it somewhere completely useless. I want to read one paragraph that sends me looking for a book that sends me looking for another book that somehow ends with me at four in the morning staring at Orion wondering what some woman standing under those same stars ten thousand years ago thought she was seeing.

This is a perfectly reasonable use of my time.

I want to understand why civilizations rise and collapse. Why human beings need tribes. Why we can know we are destroying the planet and still worry about whether Amazon can get something here by Tuesday. Why intelligent people believe contradictory things. Why we confuse certainty with intelligence. Why consciousness exists. Why anything exists.

And why everybody is apparently so fucking terrified of being alone.

I want depth.

I have never been particularly interested in the shallow end of anything.

Tell me what you believe and why you believe it. Tell me what changed you. Tell me what frightened you when you were eight. Tell me the thing you believe that you’re afraid to say out loud. Tell me whether you think consciousness ends when the machinery shuts down. Tell me what you regret. Tell me what you would do differently if nobody were watching.

I don’t particularly care what you bought at Costco.

Unless Costco has begun selling enlightenment in twelve-packs, in which case I’m listening.

This appetite for depth can make ordinary social life a little awkward. People are perfectly happy discussing weather, television and people who aren’t currently in the room while I’m standing there wondering whether industrial civilization was an evolutionary wrong turn.

I recognize this is not always ideal cocktail-party behavior.

But I like this woman.

I missed her.

And I don’t want to lose her again.

That may be what I protected least when I was in relationships. Not independence exactly. Something subtler and more precious: the ability to follow myself wherever my mind wanted to go.

Belonging can quietly interfere with that.

Belonging sounds lovely. Somebody waiting for you. Somebody knowing where you are. Somebody saying “we.”

But belonging can become expensive.

A little compromise here. A little accommodation there. You stop doing something because it bothers them. You start doing something because it pleases them. You swallow a thought because this isn’t a good time. You postpone something because there are two schedules now.

None of it looks particularly alarming.

That’s the trick.

You make yourself slightly smaller, then slightly smaller again, and every individual adjustment seems perfectly reasonable. Then one day you discover you’re living in a house built entirely out of reasonable adjustments and wondering where the hell you went.

Nobody even has to be the villain.

Two perfectly decent people can love each other and still construct a life in which one or both gradually disappears.

Sometimes what disappears isn’t even obvious. You still have your clothes. Your friends. Your opinions. Your favorite chair.

But you’ve stopped wandering.

You’ve stopped surprising yourself.

You’ve stopped asking what else might be possible.

That scares me considerably more than being alone.

I know how to belong.

I’m just not sure I want to anymore.

I want intimacy without ownership. Affection without surveillance. Loyalty without jurisdiction.

I want someone to miss me without needing to know where I am.

I want to be able to say, “I’m going away for three weeks,” without immediately scheduling a committee meeting.

And I want the same freedom for anybody I love.

That matters.

Freedom isn’t me getting to do whatever the hell I want while somebody waits faithfully at home polishing my emotional silverware. Freedom has to run both directions or it’s just selfishness wearing Oofos.

If I don’t want to be owned, I don’t get to own anybody.

If I want room to change, I have to give somebody else room to change.

If I want my life to remain unmistakably mine, I have to love someone enough to let hers remain unmistakably hers.

Maybe that kind of romantic love exists.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Here’s the part that surprises me:

I’m not terribly concerned about finding out.

That may be the biggest change of all.

For most of our lives, especially for women, partnership is treated as evidence that everything turned out okay.

Somebody chose you.

Somebody stayed.

You belong to somebody.

We even use possession as romantic language. My wife. My partner. My person.

It’s sweet until you think about it too long, which unfortunately is one of my hobbies.

I don’t want to belong to anybody.

I want to belong to myself.

And strangely, that hasn’t made me less capable of loving people. I think it may be making me better at it.

Because now when I love someone, I don’t need them to become infrastructure.

They don’t have to hold up the roof. They don’t have to provide meaning. They don’t have to reassure me that I matter, entertain me, validate me or stand between me and loneliness.

They can simply be another human being whose existence delights me.

Imagine that.

Love without a job description.

And there is so much to love that has nothing whatsoever to do with partnership.

I love my family. I love my friends. I love children who can make me grin just by thinking about them. I love people who wander into my life for an afternoon and leave something behind. I love people I rarely see but would drive through a snowstorm for.

I love ideas.

I love questions.

I love books that piss me off.

I love conversations that rearrange the furniture in my head.

I even love discovering that I’m wrong, although I reserve the right to be irritated about it for twenty minutes first.

I love this ridge in Wisconsin where the wind blows like it has a personal grievance and the sky occasionally puts on a show so extravagant it makes every human argument seem embarrassing.

And I love my own company.

I missed that.

Maybe that is what I’m most unwilling to surrender now. Not solitude for solitude’s sake, but the astonishing freedom of being able to hear my own mind again.

There is still so much I don’t know.

That thrills me.

At seventy-six, I have absolutely no interest in arriving.

I want another idea that knocks me sideways. Another place I haven’t stood. Another person who tells me something I’ve never considered. Another night under the stars when some question occurs to me that ruins a perfectly good night’s sleep.

I want to keep digging beneath the obvious until I hit something real.

So maybe I’m not bad at relationships.

Maybe I’ve simply become very expensive.

The price of admission is that I get to remain entirely myself.

No shrinking.

No ownership.

No emotional border patrol.

No surrendering my solitude because somebody else finds it threatening.

No confusing proximity with intimacy.

And nobody gets to close the door on my curiosity.

I am perfectly capable of love.

I’m just no longer willing to trade my freedom for belonging.

If that means I spend the rest of my life gloriously unfinished, wandering around my little piece of Wisconsin, looking at the sky, asking inappropriate questions, changing my mind, writing things that annoy people and following whatever rabbit hole has captured my attention that particular morning, I can live with that.

In fact, I think I might fucking love it.