Love?

I just woke from a dream of my first girlfriend. We were together again. She was acting in a play and was really rather good. They were all naked and my first girlfriend had the body of my current girlfriend, which is a very sexy body indeed. Amazing breasts – a great improvement. I liked being with her again. She surprised me.

I’m getting a lot of girlfriend confusion at the moment. It’s not so bad of late but there was a period in which I really had to concentrate to not get her name wrong. It was pretty bizarre, not something I’ve struggled with before. And not just names of recent girlfriends and lovers, every single last one of them, right back to brief flings in America and even the above mentioned girl who I was with getting on for twenty years ago, and haven’t seen since, who I never really think about. I would be wanting to say her name and the other name would be right there on the tip of my tongue. But luckily I always managed to swallow it.

There’s only been one time I’ve called a girlfriend by the wrong name and she didn’t like it one bit. Probably because there was a bit of tension around the other girl at the time. Ie, I’d been thinking about her. I laughed it off but it definitely contributed to the breakup. Another girlfriend called me by her ex’s name a couple of times but it didn’t really bother me, seemed sort of understandable. And I even witnessed her mum call her partner by her ex-husband’s name, a decade or so after their divorce, and she hated him. So it’s just one of those things.

With me, though, at the moment, there’s something different going on. Ex-girlfriends are in my mind a lot, like ghosts risen from their graves. They’ve come back to see me for some reason. I’d like to know what the reason was. The only thing I can relate it to is the first time I made love with this one particular ex of mine and how, during, I felt like I was making love with every girl I’d ever been with, like all women were in her. It was sort of a visitation and a completion and a moving on. But now they’re back.

My current girlfriend is very lovely. She’s undoubtedly the most together and nice and aware and balanced person I’ve ever been with, and I like all that about her. We don’t argue, we discuss. And everything’s up for discussion, even if it’s tough. She’s a smokin’ hot lover and she’s got the body of a page three model, except better. She likes me a lot. Everything, it would seem, is in place. And yet…

I think I find it weird that we don’t have tension, we don’t have arguments. I don’t scuttle around her, tread on tiptoes, and constantly get caught saying or doing the wrong thing. Everything’s cool by her and I’m all right. It’s weird, probably, because that’s what I’ve been used to my whole life. Criticism. Getting told off. Getting things wrong and feeling the fool. Being on eggshells. Apologising and explaining and making amends. Since birth, I suppose, those have been the characteristics of the negative side of my close relationships with women – and perhaps it’s what I’ve to come to associate with love, much as Pavlov’s dogs came to associate metronomes with food. But the metronome is not food and being constantly on guard and feeling criticised is not love. At least, I don’t think it is. In theory. So then what is love?

Someone wants you, someone listens to you. Someone understands you and says smart things and you feel peace and mutual respect and harmony. Nobody’s out to punish anyone, to get one-up. It’s wanting the best for both parties, neither happy unless the other is. Support and encouragement and togetherness. Sounds good, right? And yet…I think there’s a part of me that doesn’t buy into that, that is confused by the absence of arguments and misunderstandings and feels it as a lack of love. It’s what I know, I suppose, what I’m used to. It’s like I need a whole new way of thinking.

What is love? Is it loving someone so much you’ll kill them to keep them from being with anyone else. Or is it, as Moth Meera says, harmony, and seeking to do the right thing by the other?

The other thing that worries me about all this lack of drama is the notion that I’ve become boring. Certainly, I’m not the most exciting person in the world. But then, who is? And who needs to be? That image of the couple sitting happily by the fireside, wrapped together in silence, or her with her knitting and him with his quiet guitar…has become a reality. Beautiful image – and a pretty nice reality too. Everything’s great. So what part of me is it that frets because we don’t argue, because we don’t have any tension? If only I could appreciate what we do have rather than mourning for something that really isn’t that much fun anyway.

We all like the make up, I suppose, the endless motion of coming together and moving apart. That’s what sex is too. And we triumph sexual tension. And yet without repression, without inhibition – with the free flow of those energies – there is no tension. And that’s not a bad thing. You miss the exhilaration of release, the sudden bursting through into moments of enlightenment and realisation – but at what price do those things come? For neither do I relish a life of repression and anxiety. Perhaps we keep ourselves in those cycles because of how good it is to repeatedly experience those releases, and because there’s a comfort in sticking with that – but perhaps once we truly move beyond it we move into something greater. At least, I hope so.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a single intimate relationship with a woman that wasn’t characterised by my being on guard and feeling like I was in the wrong. That’s pretty exhausting. I’m not sure I even trust that a relationship without those things is possible – that there are women out there who can be loving and fun without the criticism and the blaming. But, so far, this woman’s different. Hopefully I’ve earned it and deserve it. It would be nice.

I think I’ll go and give her a big hug and a kiss now. And instead of fretting about our lack of drama and worrying that being happy and harmonious is dull I’ll try and rejoice in the wonder of feeling supported and encouraged and accepted – which is what, in theory, I think love is all about. It’s almost like all the good stuff is so clear and pure I can’t even see it…like looking onto the world through a perfect window, like gazing into a pristine pool – it makes it hard to appreciate what’s there, even though it might be the best of the best, when you can stare right at it and only notice it with effort, by its absence. It’s natural, and effortless, yet it’s the unnatural and the things that take effort which strive to grab our attention. And in my case, they’ve thus far succeeded. And that seems sort of wrong.