How To Spot a Relationship Glitch

There is so much, so much, too much, that has happened (to me and in me and around me) in just the past seven days that I am barely awake.

It feels like it doesn't matter what I put into my body to fuel it: This body does not want fuel. Finally it just wants rest.

Rest is on the way. Before rest, though, I have to talk to you. All of you. In particular I am thinking of the golden-haired beauty who is leaving this coast for the other. She will be sunnier and happier and lighter by several layers, there. I will miss her terribly. I will also have a new place to call home away from home. This is what I am telling myself.

This is what cannot wait to be told. These are the things that I have most recently learned about being in a relationship; they are freshly learned. It's my hope that my learning them might mean that you won't have to, at least not first-hand.

So. Not necessarily in order of importance:

It is fine, and can be beautiful, to enjoy being treated like a little girl by a man. Especially for those of us who never really had a chance to be anyone's little girl--the feeling is precious. But. Also feel free to insist upon being treated like a lady. Do not give this up if it is what feels good to you.

After repeated experimentation, this is what feels good to me. The balance is not all that delicate. The man who is worth staying beside is the man who understands this, intuitively.

The grace with which you move out of a relationship is the memory that will stay with you the longest, and a yardstick by which you can measure your own growth. The question is not whether you will experience pain; the question is what you do with the pain. Who it makes you, or doesn't.

Actually this isn't something I just learned, but it's been recently re-confirmed. Hopefully I've got it now. Hopefully you already have it, too.

Acknowledge your rage, if you have rage. Do not, please if you can help it, do not be ashamed of your rage. Try not to let anyone else's crazy stuff make you ashamed of it. It exists. It serves a purpose. You can control it and will learn things from it--what gets you ignited, what ignites others. Here's where to really listen up: Someone who genuinely loves you will bear this. Being rageful is not your most beautiful behavior. It may, however, be part of you. Along with your humor and your smile and your deep, deep ability to love. You are a package deal, not an a la carte menu.

If you can, if you're able to choose with whom you fall in love, try to fall in love with a man who has friends. Friendships formed in different ways. New friends and old friends. You will treasure the time alone, and he will recharge.

By recharging, you will not become his emotional fuel.

Finally: This, I think, is the real glitch to look for, the one underlying all of the other glitches.

Your soul, your hunger, your bigness, your brain are not shrink-to-fit. Do not try to push yourself into a suitcase smaller than what your life wants and needs to spill into. Do not start lopping off chunks of emotional limbs to appease another person's frailty, or fears, or failures.

If you do find that you are pushing yourself in this way, there is almost certainly someone exerting an equal or even stronger pull in the same direction--pulling for your smallness, your recoil, your less.

This is a good time to run like hell in the opposite direction.

Closer

As soon as I sat down to write this my phone rang. It was my soon-to-be-ex-husband. He sounded sad.

I'd hesitated to even pick up the phone when I saw the phone number calling. I am told that I am boundaryless, and I am. This particular man's problems, and there are many, are not mine any longer. Some of them never were. I left him so they no longer would be. Yet when the phone rings, and I know what's coming, what runs through my head is, I can deal with it now or I can deal with it later. Not, just don't deal with it.

Maybe just not yet.

We talk for awhile, and it's true: He is sad. He needs some love.

Sometimes it happens this way and sometimes it doesn't: I stepped up to the plate and supported him, gave him a pep talk for half an hour and listened and coached. Just before we said goodbye he was smiling, I could hear it. I hung up and cried. He is having very hard times.

The truth is, I had enough love to share. I felt extra love today, and lately I know I have been running very low. Today I was able.

Yesterday I sat nose to nose, leg-over-leg, with a man I used to call mine. With a man I so wanted, want, wanted, to be mine. It is still with me.

So I took my still-warm glow and shared it with that other man I used to call mine. What on earth is my therapist going to do with this?

So even though this man who I sat with yesterday isn't mine, and will not be mine, yesterday he was here and tonight I feel fed.

I feel closer.

Best If Lost By September 1

So as you know, I had the sweetest love affair.

Maybe you didn't know. OK: now you do. With a man who liked to slow-dance in the dark in my apartment. To the tune of his humming. (True story--this exists.)

I realize that I'm recently out of a marriage. Very recently. I think sometimes real relationships happen this way. I once said to my lover, I don't think you always get to decide when in life the most important people are going to come along. Sometimes they come at the worst possible times. You are meant to know them, however. They are not just passing through.

I was meant to know this man. Or somehow I already did. Somehow as soon as I met him I connected to him. Pure instinct. I know of no better way to explain.

But for reasons, so many reasons, so many biblical and ethical and primal and big, big hard reasons, it wouldn't work. We couldn't, it wouldn't, the damned thing just wouldn't work. He called it a car with no brakes. It was: It was relationship bulimia. We sucked each other in with starving abandon and spat each other out with rage and shame. Over, over and over.

Until one day, we came up with a solution.

No: I came up with a solution. I get to own this brainchild.

Because we couldn't live serenely with each other, but could not seem to consider living without each other, why not agree to an expiration date?

An expiration date is similar to another notion I've had: the 3-year contract. [It wouldn't have to be 3-year; it could be 6-month, 1-year, etc.] It's exactly as it sounds: A couple would agree to be together for a set amount of time, and would agree ahead of time when they will expire as a couple.

It seems like it would take so much pressure off, doesn't it? The big what-are-we-going-to-do-about problems go away. It's becomes about time together, you two, right now.

If either of these notions instinctively repels you, you might as well keep reading because you've come this far but the rest of this isn't going to make much sense: He agreed.

He chose September 1. I agreed. We hugged. We loved. We had us back.

And we did--I suppose I will never know what he experienced in the short time that ensued, but I felt ridiculousy alive. My joy was overwhelming. I found myself on many sunny afternoons walking along Upper Broadway thinking, this is why I got divorced. I am happy in the deepest possible place.

But it turned out not to be enough. It turned out we couldn't even make it for three more weeks.

We blew up again, unexpectedly, suddenly, on a dazed hot Sunday in May, and we couldn't reel it back. It had, I had, it had, gotten too ugly, too screwed up. Somewhere we had gotten too far gone. We were so on fire that nothing could put out the flames. I personally was an inferno. More about that another time, when I dare to look more closely.

The truth is that the expiration date was bound for failure for the most fundamental reason: It was a lie. I never meant it to work. I didn't believe he would be able to leave me on September 1. True story? I didn't believe he would leave me, ever. I thought we were like that.

So all of the good stuff, all of the living room dancing, was gone again and hard in a big dead instant: a telephone hung up, a small sob in an empty little room. A moment so loud and so silent at the same time that it will take the rest of your life to get the sound out of your ears.

Here's my bottom line: While the expiration date is probably only a great idea in very select situations, absolutely do not consider it with a man you love.

Oh, how you will ache.

Ask Me If I Care

I just wrote a very heartfelt post, a very raw, honest, heartfelt post. I hit publish, and it all disappeared.

Went to some chat rooms, and apparently this is fairly common. So I will take it as prophetic, and try to think about what counted most about what I wrote. What was the meta-message.

Perhaps it is this.

Sometimes (if not always) in the process of loving someone, we draw upon the things inside of us that we most wish to rid ourselves of. Maybe not everyone does this--maybe some level of maturity or ambivalence steers some of us clear. I am not one of those people. I don my flaws like a pair of new wings and soar around on them. It would be more spectacular if it were not self-destructive.

So, this is part of my work. My work, the work I am here to do in this outfit, this skin, this life, this go-around, this however-long-it-takes-to-get-it-right. And here is today's lesson, lovely friends:

When your doing YOUR work becomes a full-time and not enjoyable job for someone else, you are probably not on a path to something good.

When you become work for someone else, it might be time to leave.

I could be wrong about this. Maybe there is love so big and forgiving that it holds you aloft, even when you are each really difficult work for the other.

I would like to meet this love so big.

I care that I became work for another person. Work. Instead of being their best time. Their best, sweetest, swaying-to-the-music, kissing-my-neck-from-behind, in our own little cave in our own little time best time.

I care. I want to be someone's best time.

OK?

My Soul is Drenched and My Arms Are Warm

I am happy.

Let's see if I can write.

He came home to me, my man. Deliciously so. I couldn't really convince myself that it was over and it wasn't. Isn't. We continue.

It made me think of something I wanted to tell you.

My big sister is not the gentlest person on one's soul. She has been known to suck the air out of a room. But she can occasionally be delightfully eloquent. Once, when I was fully entangled in a breaking love, a great big affair that had knocked the wind out of me, said something that was unimagineable to me at the time, yet I've experienced repeatedly ever since.

I remember it was a cold, winter Friday night during a blackened, grieving time. My sister stopped by on her way somewhere, a duty call; we had a glass of wine. I was nursing this awful broken heart. Finally, after the last anecdote she could hear for the evening, my sister said: Anything that happens between two people can be un-done, re-done, or re-thought in an hour or a weekend or a conversation. Nothing between two people is ever set in stone.

I don't know what core element of truth this points to within us, or whether it does at all.

I do know that I have experienced this personally and seen it happen from a distance, over and over.

I also know that I slept curled like a ball next to my lover, my love, last night, and my soul is drenched and yes my arms are still warm.

For now this is more than enough.

Vermints

First thing this morning I cleaned out the leftovers of a love affair. A shirt that once smelled deliciously of him, but now smelled 100% me; a bottle of unopened champagne; a ceramic-potted cactus that, while tiny, was vibrant in color and invitingly thorny. Some stuff from the kitchen that was too sharply, recognizably his--apple cider, pickles. Things I might eat at someone else's house but not keep at my own.

The only hold-out is this small box of mints. Vermints, peppermint flavor. They look like altoids but they're Vermont's all-natural, and glucose-free. This, or some other memory they evoke, makes them unbearably delicious. These I will eat, one after another, until I have finished writing, and then the Vermints will leave the apartment with me on my walk to the park. The Vermints won't return. They are the item of his that has been here the longest, and they will be the last to go.

It seems, readers, my friends, girls, that I can really only dig in to writing when I am FRESH with pain, dripping with it or the musings on it. When happiness or contentment starts to seep in, I seem to have less to say. If kindness drifts in, I'm mute.

He, this man I just excavated, was very unbelievably kind for a very brief (in retrospect), intense spell. Less than six weeks, but the spell made it feel much longer. I can't explain it better than to say I felt wrapped in a swath of this man's abundant warmth and love, almost immediately. At the same time, his dominance frightened me and seduced me, simultaneously. I have always been a very dominant woman. I actually survived my life because of it. And here was the most dominant man I have ever met. It was heady. And terrifying. The most frightening thing I've ever done, I'd say, so far. It felt unbearably good.

I had surgery during the period we were togther, a major surgery requiring several nights in the hospital, about three weeks after we'd met. This man showed up at my apartment, pure surprise, on the night before my surgery. He knew I was alone and would probably be freaking out. On the day they cut me open and sewed me back together with a new part, he appeared, again, unexpectedly, at my bedside. He held my hand while my other hand held a morphine pump. This is, was, incredible to me. What had I done to earn this hand? I still can not make sense of it. I was giddy that night, surrounded by machines and blips and nurses. I was not actually in a hospital, I was in a room with this man. We might have been sitting in a park.

The way he left feels unkind, but maybe it is my still-much-too-close perspective. I don't actually understand the way that we ended. Maybe in time I fully will, and then I will see that his kindness lasted to the end. This is too hard to think about just yet.

But this man's kindness is not what I really came here to tell you about. It is his indescribable smell. And his very unusually colored eyes that were PERFECT windows, really perfect, into his wavelength--not what he was thinking or feeling, but a perfect read of his brain's temperature. I don't know how else to explain it. And his leg: He was a leg-shaker. Do you understand? He is that kind of man, very wrapped up, very going on with things, always somewhere, always looking deeper.

Sometimes this quest for the light of deeper shined on me. Sometimes he shined it on me. It felt like glory.

When something like this kind of light from a man with eyes and a heart like this shines on you, friends, I advise you to do one of two things: Either run for cover. [PLEASE NOTE: This is a very wise choice! There is nothing wrong with running for cover! Do not confuse my own refusal to choose this choice with my sole endorsement of the other choice.]

Or: Breathe it in. Take big gulping breaths. Gasp for, grasp for, cling to, as much as you can and CRAVE for the rest. Invite it all in, and give it all up. Know that it might be ten years or never before another light like this shines on you. Hope that you have soaked in enough of it to remember its taste when your soul is dry and your arms are cold.

This will hurt like hell when you are packing up his cactus and jar of pickles.

Then go leave the damned Vermints in the park.

This is the best I can do, today. Tomorrow I will try to do better.

Truing It Up

At coffee with a friend this afternoon, we spoke in detail, finally (it had been a long time since we'd been face-to-face), about what I'm starting to think of as my imminent divorce.

After talking through the details of what's happening, when is it happening and how, she asked me a question I hadn't considered until I heard it fall out of her mouth. What about you, she said, long-term? What do you want?

She meant, do you want to remarry? Stay single? Start dating right away? Wait a while, then date?

My gut reaction was the blind panic I have come to recognize as the body's instinctive reaction to the crossing paths of the concepts divorce/change and me/my world. I let it pass. As soon as I was breathing normally again, I thought: what is she talking about?

What do I want?

What an enormous question this is. What a gigantically relevant and shockingly unaddressed question for someone who has just agreed to an ending of her marriage and has moved out of her home.

What do I want?

Excellent.

The answer that I gave just fell out of my mouth--it was so smooth it felt well-rehearsed, though I've never uttered it before. I said: I don't think I want to get married again, but I could see myself in a series of long-term, monogamous relationships--it's what I've always done. She nodded, understanding. We didn't talk about each of our views on what is or isn't realistic or attainable over the spans of years, a life spent bearing witness to another flawed human being's wrangling with life. We've had that conversation before.

After we left the coffee shop and each other, each walking our own way into the freezing, urban January dusk, I thought about it again. What do I want.

I got home to the apartment I'm subletting. I called my going-to-be-ex-husband. We both cried a little. Questioned the decision we've questioned and re-made eight million times. Hung up the phone. Again I thought it. What do I want?

I thought about the response I had given my friend: Probably not marriage again. Love in whatever form it arrives, yes; companionship; yes. Sex with available men (maintaining certain standards of pickiness), absolutely yes. Commit to one person again forever? Probably not.

And STILL I kept thinking, but what do I WANT? Specifically, clearly, what do I want?

And then I found the answer, or it found me.

I want HUGE love. I want big, huge love. I want love that makes your heart feel so safe and so challenged at the same time, your soul takes root in another human being. I am describing something that I am guessing that I have never felt, or possibly only felt as a very young woman during my first, all-consuming love affair (before I learned that there was any other way).

I want a love whose eyes can't help but pay attention when you walk into a room. I want a love that calls you pretty and kisses you until your mouth gets chapped. I want a love that remembers how to laugh, and that you can laugh easily with.

And the truth is, I don't really care so much about marriage. I could skip it. I could also do what I passed on my first time around if it mattered to the person I loved: the whole public ceremony situation. Get all decked out and invite your friends. I could see myself being happy doing anything in between. It's not what interests me primarily.

What interests me primarily, what I want, is the big love. Passion + acceptance + room for growth.

I don't know if this exists.

But I know that this is what I want.

Hopefully this is a good start.