When I was growing up I believed in the idea of being a virgin until marriage. My parents were religious and I had to go to church with them every week, but my reasoning didn't have anything to do with god. I came home after school one day when I was six or seven and watched an episode of The Phil Donahue Show in which the subject was people who were saving themselves from marriage. One of the panelists was wearing a white wedding gown, and while I don't remember anything that was said on the show, I felt swept away by the idea. It was like I had suddenly been given the words to articulate a romantic impulse that had been welling up in my little adolescent body.
The idea that two people could be predestined for each other, so connected that they should preserve their most intimate selves until the day when they could finally be together was revelatory. Over New Year's my friend C told me, with eyes rolling, that I'm in love with my own ability to be in love. Watching Donahue as a wide-eyed kid I felt like there was a missing half for me, going about her life unaware of my existence. It was my task to find her, and preserving my virginity as some hairless expression of my faith that we would be together became an imperative.
It's good to be six years old.
As an adult, the idea is silly. How could love be a force for holding you back from experiencing new things? Of all the women I have been in love with, I can't imagine wanting any of them to forgo an experience simply out of deference to me. This is an image of love as a yoke, a weight of obligation slung around your partner's neck, constricting them with your need for emotional constancy. It's so easy to fixate on the process of finding love, the simple nursery rhyme of discovery. The real feat of falling in love is figuring out how to live with it for a lifetime after you've stumbled across it in a bar, classroom, or friend's party.
I have no idea what I want. I want constancy and comfort in the same way I want to eat the whole pint of ice cream in one sitting. It's perfectly logical until the instinct has been sated and there's nothing left but wallowing and bloat, the dizzy afterglow of having gorged on something rich, sweet, and lacking any real sustaining qualities. I don't know if I can be in a long-term relationship. The six year-old controlling the knobs and levers of my heart wants it.
How can you stay together with someone for a long period of time, lives intrinsically connected, and not become a burden to one another? Love is a terrible thing, I think, because it's never enough. It's always beset with semantics and obstacles that take an increasingly heavy toll on two people the longer they try and stay together. Having watched my parents fight and torture each other while I was growing up, it's tempting to imagine they both would have been more content and fulfilled living separately.
Like childhood, love eventually transforms from melodic idealism into a pragmatic riddle. The charm, wit, and closeness become repetition and predictability, with a healthy dose of wrinkles and morning breath to make the fading luster seem even more indignant.
I don't know if that's true, but it's what I fear. When I was six the idea of promising away the whole of my life seemed like an imperative. Now that I've seen all the ways I've changed up until this point, it's a scary idea to think about promising someone I'll still be with them when I'm sixty. Especially when there's a six year-old in control of my heart.
Previous Posts:
Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date
Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After
Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans
Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog
Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home
Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party
Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date
Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson
Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap
Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction
Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog
Date Machine: Rate My Politics
High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies
Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux
Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN
Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For