This will be one of those real sentimental posts, so if that makes you kinda squeamish, you might want to come back another day. Besides being mushy, it’s also pretty radical, and sort of violates the usual social norms.
I guess I might as well just jump right in …
A couple years ago I wrote about meeting a wonderful man, and we have been involved in a lovely relationship since then. Last week, our many gentle conversations over the past few years about whether we were compatible enough to consider marriage culminated in a mutual acknowledgment that our time together as a couple had come to a natural end. We immediately began the process of gracefully and lovingly parting ways.
Here’s my little theory on this: when most of what you have in common is simply that you love each other, it’s not enough to sustain a lifelong partnership. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry nailed it: Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction.
Of course, we had more in common than loving each other, or we wouldn’t have lasted as long as we did. But we’d noticed that over time we were spending more and more time away from each other doing other things, and that when we would come back together, we weren’t all that interested in hearing what the other had been up to. For some couples, that’s not a problem. For us, it just was.
So love, in our case, right this moment, means that we release each other with open hearts to our futures. It means I help him search for an apartment, and we do not argue about what he takes with him when he moves out.
It means that our bodies still touch when we are sitting next to each other—even as we work together on my match.com profile. It means that we cherish our time together, savoring the last precious days of each other’s company.
And it means that he is, at this very moment, downstairs having a lively phone conversation with a woman I introduced him to. A woman I thought might be a better match for him than I am.
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