Suddenly Awry: Notes from Love in the Slow Lane

I can’t believe falling in love can be so exhausting but it’s that way for both of us. The difference between zero companions and one companion is like the difference between having one head and two. You are suddenly seeing the world two ways at once and that expansion is taxing; especially if you thought it could not happen to you. . . if you’re closing in on, or just leaving behind, your 70’s.

Gentle inquiries of each other pepper the day; would you prefer this or that? Shall we do (whatever) now or later? Are you hungry or should we go for a walk? Are you busy? Do you have time to hear this? Arggggh! This is so complicated! Help me think! Does the music bother you? I should go home and let you have your (something something) in peace. Oh don’t go. I miss you so.

This all takes emotional fiber and we both wish they sold it at Walmart.

They say living alone requires strength of character and of course it does. You have to be able to withstand the ferocious sense of silence, the isolation that feels not just existential but sometimes real, three dimensional and organic, like maybe you really are the last person on the planet. But you get used to it.

In time people find that aloneness is not as all-encompassing as it seemed at first. There are sounds in the silence and they indicate lives going on. We can investigate and discover that we share space with other life-forms. There is T.V. and there are movies. There are plants and pets; we have the telephone; email; music and books. And, of course, you get out and about.

But a lot of the mitigation to aloneness seems to come from developing a habit of self-talk. I am talking to people in my head. I am talking to myself and answering. I toss off one-liners to the cats, the car, the untrimmed shrubbery. And all of that is easy because it’s all an unimpeded flow of self with no hesitations, no balancing or challenging ideas. It is really me keeping my sense of who I am alive; keeping before myself an image of how the world is with little affirmations, little gestures that tell me where I fit into the scheme of things.

As a couple, self-talk is the first thing to go. Space explodes with points of view and different ideas of what and who we are. Everything peacefully taken for granted yesterday is up for re-examination today. I am not alone. I am loved. But if I’m loved then I’m not exactly who I’ve been thinking I was all these years. And all the little habits that identified me to myself are suddenly awry.

I love you. We are in our 8th, 9th decade of life. We thought we knew our individual terrain. Now I abandon myself to make you laugh. You attend with interest to my habits and pleasures. I want you to be afloat in the appreciation I feel for you and vice-versa. It’s all very, very different from being completely on our own, alone and entrenched and we are, both of us, shaking with exhaustion by evening. Maybe we are really just too old for this, I think.

But then we regard each other, our eyes hold, and there is an ocean of you before me. I am on the shore of you and you go on forever and there is no one else like you. You are bigger and deeper than even you know yourself to be. And maybe I am too. Shipwrecks lie wafting in the fathoms of our years. The surface sparkles in the light of our regard. We are two who have found each other at the end, and for a measure of time, before familiarity has limited our vision, before one of us has to leave, something in us has sense enough to tremble; and trembling, to hang on.