I just Want Someone to Be Bored With
Dear Harriet,
Over the years you’ve been asked a lot of strange questions about relationships and love, but you’ve never really addressed the most important one of all: How do you make a relationship last?
— Afraid of Being Bereft and Alone
Now that is a good question, ABBA, and it’s also a very timely reminder that not all of my readers are wild-haired cultists with furry squirrel suits in their closet harboring dreams of one day indulging in a three-way in which they’re blissfully sandwiched between Madeleine Albright and the Gerber baby. I was recently on a website devoted to cataloging (and snarking) about the endless parade of perversions available on the internet and someone had actually created a thread about “certain grad school newspapers” in “New York City, home of the perverts” that foster “depraved conversations” about “sex and sex-related activities.” It was all maddeningly vague but I think, based on a passing reference in the thread to the manliness of fisting, that they were actually referring to the column last May that was guest-written by my mother.
What I find interesting about your question, ABBA, is that you refer to relationships and love, but I think it’s pretty clear that they’re not the same thing, and you ask not about making love last but about keeping the relationship as preferable to the forlorn alternative in which we sit on the end of our bed in an empty apartment, contemplating the smudged windows that look out onto a soulless amalgamation of concrete and steel and glass infested with men and women whose sole object is their own personal satisfaction, thinking that they became that way because they are wandering life alone without companionship, without the anchor of a human being inside their mind and heart.
If love and relationships are separate entities, separate conditions, then we must consider the relationship in isolation, apart from the love that may have brought it into being.
Can a relationship persist after the love has worn away? Is that a good thing? Are we still better off with someone, rather than being left to fend for ourselves in this nasty, cutthroat, Hobbesian world of greed and desperation around us?
My friend Marie has been in several relationships that lasted years, and everyone always wondered how she did it. I have finally come to the conclusion that she’s got an advantage over a lot of the rest of us: She’s completely clueless. The warning signs of relationship peril were all there—her partner’s mysterious absences, fights about nothing, passive-aggressive notes left on the fridge, and so on.
Yet Marie blissfully went on coasting, leaving things exactly as they were, being just active enough to keep her partners from thinking she didn’t care—because she did care, but not enough to fix things or walk away. So this would go on forever until finally the guy had to shake her by her figurative lapels and let her know things were not good. And the funny thing is, after she promised that her wake-up call was received and heard, she’s hit snooze again for another year, until finally the boyfriend, still in love but fed up, was forced to walk away. The cynic in me wants to applaud Marie for keeping her relationships going so long, but was she really happy? She wasn’t alone, but I have to believe that some amount of the psychic pain her guy was experiencing infected her as well. It seems like she was better off, but I really wonder.
So perhaps we’re back to keeping love alive. There’s one thing I believe, ABBA, and that’s that love is not a passive thing. Work at it. It must be fed and cultivated, like that nice-smelling basil plant in the plastic dish in my kitchen window. You keep love alive by acting on it, making the moments you spend with your loved one matter. Because if you stop watering that basil plant in the window, you might still have a kitchen, but it won’t smell as nice.
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