Let go of your heart, let go of your head, and feel it now
Fall is well underway now. The mornings have been chillier. Shannon likes it pretty darned cool, which is to say damned near cold in the house, so we haven't really run the furnace more than a couple of times this fall. It has dropped to 58° F in the house on a couple of mornings, and I've turned the furnace on a couple of times to warm the place up to a more respectable 68° F. This morning the sky dumped a downpour on Livermore for maybe an hour. It hit while I was on the Dublin Grade. Let's hope that this keeps up and that we've seen the last of the drought for the time being. There was another long half an hour of hard rain this morning while I was at work.
By 12:30 this afternoon, the rain had stopped, for the most part, and the weather radar on the web said that the raiin had moved off east of Alameda, so I decided to go walking. My boss, Marty, saw me walking out the door and suggested that I take my umbrella, but I figured that the rain was done for the day, or the next several hours, at least, and I left the stadium umbrella in the trunk of my car. It turned out that it wasn't quite finished drizzling and dropping sprinkles. On my four mile, seventy five minute walk I got a bit soggy, but not wet or soaked. It was OK. The temperature was about 57° F. It was a nice walk, and I spent it thinking about the present state of my psyche and about the tangle that is the state of my love-life right now.
How can I become so attached to someone who can apparently discard me without further ado? Why am I missing her? Why am I conflicted? What is with this anger? If I love her, why should I be so angry? If I disapprove of what she does so much, of our differing relationship philosophies, then why fall in love with the woman? Why do I find her company so pleasurable most of the time? Why was it so hard for the both of us to sort out a course of action that worked for us, without all of the emotional baggage cluttering up the process and getting in the way? Why was it so hard to engage in
"Calming [my]self down, not letting [my] anxiety run away with [me], and not getting overreactive. Not cave-in to pressure to conform from a “partner” who has tremendous emotional significance in [my] life..."
Schnarch, David (2011-10-01). Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships (p. 1). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition. "
He goes on to say:
"We approach romance like a privileged form of suffering that makes us feel more alive - living dangerously, magnificently, and tragically."
Schnarch, David (2011-10-01). Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships (p. 6). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition.
Feeling more alive, living dangerously and magnificently sound like wonderful things to pursue. I'm mortally tired of the tragic though. Sometimes, all I can think of is conversations I long to hold with that woman - and I think back on that wonderful feeling of domesticity, of place, of belonging, and it pulls at me. Other times, I can't stop arguing with her in my head. I can't stop myself from arguing with myself. Why is it so hard? Why am I so angry? Why does it take so long for this stuff to resolve? I keep thinking about that book I read back around the time Crystal left, by lawyer Melvin Belli. In it, I learned Belli had been married five or six times. Similarly to my wondering about someone who has had many sex partners, I am wondering about the people who have had lots of relationships, Great Hod, where do they find the time? It's taken me the thirty five years of my adult life to work through my relationships with a small handful of people. How do people do it, just drop something about which they feel or have felt passionately and then just "move on" to someone else? Laurel had been in a relationship with the physicist for five years before she met me, and she told me that she considered herself single and the previous relationship over when she met me in May of 2014, after being what she considered at the time as being "broken up with him" ... after only two months. How do people do that? Hmm, in her case, it obviously wasn't done all that well...but that's not the issue. What is the issue is how can people just...drop out of a relationship and pop into another after such a short time? I was talking to Shannon earlier in the evening and I asked her how long the longest romantic relationship shed been in had lasted. She said fourteen months. I correctly surmised that she meant her relationship with a guy named Rex. That relationship broke up in February of 2014. I asked her how long it had taken her to get over it and she replied: "I still am."
The parts of me that feel that she is incredible, that believe that my relationship with her was worth working to improve and perfect it, do not wish to believe two things: that she would not feel the same way about our relationship, and that I could in fact choose and fall for someone who would not feel the same way. Are those parts foolish? Is there something that must be learned here, or is it simply the case that we can and do make mistakes? Even if I made a mistake though, it still hurts. They just won't let go of her. Pete Gerlach says people most often fail to learn how to properly grieve as children. I believe that is almost certainly the case with me. I suck at it. I should probably get back to Gerlach's site and keep reading and working on stuff there as soon as I have finished working on Schnarch's book.