The Curmudgeon Valentine

Notes from the land of contradiction.

The dog doesn’t understand love either, but if you feed him you’ll get his. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

I just can’t write about love on Valentine’s Day. It’s ridiculous. I refuse to write about such a misunderstood, misaligned mess.

Sorry folks, no love here. Move along. Please go elsewhere for waxing poetic about a word that has hundreds of different variations, but only one spelling. Flat out of love essays.

Here’s what happened to lead up to my latest episode of Love Curmudgeon.

My friend Ellen was in a show Saturday night called Love Notes. Think Modern Love meets The Moth, and you’ll get an idea of what the show was like; real people reading stories about love.

It was in a theatre on the Upper West Side, so Secret Service and I made a night of it. We decided to call it our Valentine’s Day, because he wants to play hockey on the 14^th and I want to play poker.

Tell me that’s not romance.

Ellen was brilliant, had the audience eating out of her hand. She was hilarious, moving, and looked like a million bucks.

She and her husband are a lot like Secret Service and I: two very different people married to each other, two individuals doing their own thing.

Ellen and I are on the wild side of the personality spectrum. Both our husbands are highly intelligent, well-read, interesting, and easy on the eyes. But they’re quiet.

Ellen and I are not quiet.

Now, granted, this is my take on them, not their characterization of their relationship. All I know is what I observe. I think we four provide our partners a lot of entertainment.

Don’t knock the arrangement. They’re celebrating fifty years together this year, and Secret Service and I have been married for at least two hundred years.

During the show, some of the stories people told truly spoke to me. Others, not so much. Not a surprise. But peculiarly, I got my nose out of joint with a few of them.

It has to do with the characterization of love. It got me wondering about what love was, and why my experience of romantic love seems so different from several women who read.

I looked up the definition of the word.

love

/ləv/

noun

1. an intense feeling of deep affection.

Okay. Yawn.

A few women spoke about the love they were waiting for. I think it’s important to note most of them were a generation younger than I. They spoke of qualities they wanted in a partner. I’ve heard similar language and desires in more than one place in contemporary literature. It’s a philosophy of sorts, and goes something like this:

He sees me.

He gets me.

He’s my person.

He values and respects me.

He listens to me.

Followed by,

I deserve these things.

I refuse to settle.

Huh, I thought to myself. Well, good luck with that.

It occurs to me I may just be old, stuck with antiquated ideas of love. These are modern women, and I am well aware they’re probably on to something I didn’t feel capable of giving myself.

But this love they desire seems dry as a bone. This love sounds more like a social experiment or science project. I don’t think I ever successfully made a list of what I want in a guy. I might have tried, once. But it stumped me, and I couldn’t see the point.

I’ve never been able to do anything about falling in love. When it hit, it hit. It’s almost always a chemical reaction, and good luck fighting chemistry. It’s way above my pay grade.

I’ve fallen in love, known it was a terrible idea, and been incapable of turning my back on it.

Also, I can’t conjure up a perfect person. He or she is in my imagination, so they’re not a human being. I can’t cuddle up to an idea.

When love has come my way, and it has, it invariably hits me like a freight train. The last thing I’m thinking about is,

Is he available? Does he see the real me?

When love comes my way, it’s historically a big mess. A catastrophe. It’s a glorious, all-consuming disaster which I wouldn’t trade for anything.

There are those amongst you who are sniffing to yourselves that what I’m describing is not love, but lust. For the record, I think lust is a vulgar word without a bit of poetry in it.

And, screw you. I know love when I feel it.

I got highly irritated and suspicious when I fell in love with Secret Service. I had my eyebrow raised at him for nineteen years. He was like no one I’d ever been with. How could this happen?

He didn’t need me.

I was not filling a void in his life. He loved me because he loved me, not because I fixed something broken in him. My relationship with him is still a bit of a mystery.

But in the early days, we went to my friend Richard Move’s show Ghostlight. In the piece (I do hope I’m remembering correctly, it was decades ago) they talked about a relationship Martha Graham had with a businessman. And a sentence stuck out. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this:

Every artist is like ivy, and needs a wall to climb.

Later that night, Secret Service said,

“Let me be your wall.”

You might be thinking,

Ah-ha! You’re contradicting yourself. You found your person. He sees you!

But I think it was something else. I think he was offering a framework for us, a system for how two such opposing personalities could love each other for the long haul.

Not that either of us had a long haul in mind. We were in firm agreement. Marriage was stupid.

---

But I don’t want to write about love today. Valentine’s Day leaves 90% of the population feeling depressed. We’re either not in a relationship and alone, or in a relationship with the wrong person, or the right person gave them the wrong gift and doesn’t know them at all.

The only winners are florists and the Hallmark company, and maybe the ten percent of us who are having a good year.

Because even if a love is perfect, it can go. And it will, eaten by death or time. Love also carries the agony of staying power, even when it’s inactive. Love is full of terrible paradox.

---

We are driving home after the show, and I am complaining. My focus is on a phrase I heard that night, a phrase I’ve heard a lot:

Because I deserve it.

“Why,” I ask, “does this bother me so much? I am all for women’s empowerment. This shouldn’t bother me, but it does.”

“It’s maybe a little entitled,” Secret Service says.

“Yes,” I say, thanking my lucky stars he’s smart and can help sort these matters.

There is a difference between entitlement and empowerment. From where I sit, and I’ve been sitting and watching love for over forty years, love is a risk, not a certainty.

Love has nothing to do with deserving anything.

Of course we deserve love, who says we don’t? Perhaps I need to define deserve:

de·serve

/dəˈzərv/

verb

1. do something or have or show qualities worthy of (reward or punishment).

"the referee deserves a pat on the back for his bravery"

Here we have it. It comes down to reward and punishment.

If I deserve love, are there people who don’t? Why should I get it and someone much nicer not have it? Why do I get a great husband, as husbands go, and someone who has always wanted marriage stay single?

I want women to be in their full power and move through the world as themselves. But why do we think romantic love is just desserts?

There are not enough fantastic people on earth to partner everyone. It’s a question of mathematics. If we think about love in terms of merit, life is going to deliver a big fat tray of disappointment to most of us.

May I point out there was only one David Bowie. I rest my case.

It’s also difficult for me to think I deserve perfect romantic love when two billion people on earth don’t have access to plumbing. If I didn’t have clean drinking water, I tell you what: love could kiss my ass. I’d choose the water.

---

Sadly, now I’ll contradict myself.

One of the most interesting pieces was by a man who thought he’d experienced perfect love for a day. And how he compared all other relationships to it.

Oh, boy. Golden Love. What a nightmare.

I’ve been there. Scratch that, I’ve parked there and turned the ignition off. I take a certain slice of time and remember the bliss I felt, and how can anything live up to this experience? How can anyone be right for me if it’s not the Golden Love?

When the man read the piece, I squirmed a bit. I both identified with him and thought it a ridiculous expectation. Which means I think I’m ridiculous and entitled, just like all those I criticize.

Because of course I think I deserve Golden Love every day, forever and ever.

This makes me very tired.

---

During the performance, a woman referred to her divorce, and said her thirty-year marriage wound up a failure.

And I heard Secret Service say under his breath,

“That’s not a failure.”

Exactly.

We talked about it a little in the car. And he said anyone who stays with another person for 30 years has a success, no matter how it ends. If you can stay together that long without killing each other, it’s a miracle.

It’s not lost on me we’ve been together 28 years. He’s talking about us.

He’s able to look at our relationship with clear eyes. People tend to go on a bit about how lucky we are, and they’re right.

But he and I are together because we continue to choose each other.

Our commitment is a choice we make today. It’s not a choice we made almost thirty years ago on a beach. I don’t know if we’ll continue to make the same choice in ten years.

I’d say the odds look good for us staying together. It’s getting better for us with time. I also know I picked War Emblem at 20-1 when he took the Kentucky Derby. Anything can happen.

People change. And I don’t know if simply having a long marriage is a success or not. People stay married for all sorts of reasons: convenience, kids, a sense of family, divorce is expensive.

Why do we judge it all? Why do we think we need a merit system? Why does it have to be good or bad? I could no more tell you what’s a good marriage than give you the square footage of the pyramids.

(Look in the comments for someone giving us the square footage of the pyramids.)

I return to my thesis. Love is a big mess. Love is a crapshoot. Love is a thousand things. Love contradicts itself.

All these ideas about love get in the way of the real thing. The perfect love is a distraction.

There. I finally got there. But a distraction from what?