Lessons Will be Repeated Until Learned

"The problem is that you want all your relationships to be forever."

Michelle and I are having our weekly check-in. We're at our favorite pho restaurant, and I'm grateful for the spiciness of the jalapenos and Sriracha. They give me a plausible reason for my streaming eyes. 

She gives me that significant best friend look. "Honey, the only person you're allowed to count on forever is me. And that's only because I don't trust you not to poach my life events for your memoir." 

I laugh and start crying again. I'm in what women's magazines call your "mourning period," that really dreadful part of any splitting up when you realize holy shit, I'm never going to see this person again. And, you know, you fall apart. 

And it's fucking awful. 

True to form, I'm having my meltdown about seven months after the fact. It's the reason I spent the last five days in my apartment with the doors closed. I had confided in the people I was going to confide in, aired all the emotional shit, and then tucked in with my emotional reset button and didn't see people again until I felt like I wouldn't be blowing my nose every two minutes.

That's not to say when I emerged I was super-sociable.

***

I've spent most of my weekend with my nose in a book 

I set reading goals. Normally it's simply a number of books that I'd like to read in the course of the year. This year, in addition to wanting to read fifty books I am trying to read significantly more nonfiction than the single book by David Sedaris that I read last year (I don't even know if he counts as nonfiction anymore). I've already made that goal with River of Doubt and The Code Book (both of which I enjoyed tremendously). 

When I say I spent most of the weekend with my nose in a book I mean I spent most of the weekend with my nose in a nonfiction book. I took it to a friend's 30th birthday party (before you get all judgey, it was at a roller rink and I don't rollerskate) and read it while everyone was roller-skating. I spent most of this morning making marginalia and laughing out loud.

The book is Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis. A more correct title would probably be Against Monogamy or Against Teenage Conceptions of Love as an Adult but despite the titular deficiencies, it's been an enjoyable read. 

After getting about a third of the way through I was tempted to ask the person who suggested what the fuck he was thinking. I had to pause and wonder if perhaps I was being baited. I'm a self-professed lover of love and precisely the wrong audience for a polemic against it. 

But, baited or no, I kept reading it in little five to ten page chunks. And this weekend it sucked me in. 

I believe firmly that books can rip you apart and build you into a new, better person. I just also happen to believe that the books that do so tend to be fiction. I have a list (of course I have a list) of books that unmade me and forced me to look at the unsavory bits alongside the good parts and come to terms with the whole complete mess (list available upon request, but regular readers could probably guess at least a few). So my reaction to Against Love is remarkable, because I don't typically react this way to nonfiction.

I don't think that Against Love is quite going to be one of those books that remakes me. But it's a book that reads like a conversation with Michelle. It grabbed me and asked if the way that I've always considered something that seems so basic (love and relationships) was the right way. 

It's been enough of a smack upside the head to keep me absorbed all weekend. 

***

In October of last year a band I love came out with a new album. 

The first single off the album, "Shake," was the perfect song for that period in my life. In many ways, it persists as the perfect song for this period in my life.  

I am not good at just being in the present moment. Whether it's a function of anxiety or modernity or simply my personality, I have a tendency to think a week, a month, twenty years in the future. It's a character trait that makes it hard to settle down into relationships, be they romantic or otherwise. 

I am, as a result of a lot of factors, a difficult person to get to know. As a result, when I finally do make new friends or start dating someone (and actually let them in under the enormous, silly defenses I've erected) I want it to be forever. It seems stupid to be to invest all the emotional energy in someone who's only going to be around for a few months or a few years. There's no possible way that I can get anything worthwhile from someone who isn't going to be in my life forever.

It's a stupid, silly way to think about relationships. The one that ended last fall and that I'm finally dealing with now has years worth of memories attached to it that (even if they're making me kind of weepy these days) I wouldn't sacrifice for anything. I regret that it ended, I regret the way that it ended, but to say that I'm not a better, different person as a result of it would be foolish.

It's the lesson Michelle tries to impart to me over our steaming bowls, it's the lesson Against Love, it's the lesson of The Head & The Heart song, and it's the lesson I feel I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to learn.

Things don't have to be forever to be valuable.