You Just Know

I have often said I have never loved anyone. This is perhaps a lie, I may have loved someone once. A liar and a fraud! I don't like to think on it, is the thing. I understood him. He knew me. And it put everything else in a certain perspective: people either get it or they don't. The ones who get it are the ones for me. We create one another in our own images, to some extent, but this man got it. He knew me, and I knew him.

And he was brilliant and terrible, emotional, difficult, passionate, stubborn; we were too alike, our flaws and tempers too similar, only he was irritable and unreasonable and moody; and we drew the best and the worst out of one another, over and again, until we had both grown entirely exhausted. And it was terribly chaotic, an emotional rollercoaster, and the lows were well worth suffering in exchange for the unspeakable highs.

We fought constantly. At some point, though, I didn't want to fight anymore, didn't want to fight anyone, I have always had to fight, and I was so tired of it, and I least of all wanted to fight him. So I walked away.

I have thought about this since, and wondered if I had tried harder, if I had been more yielding, if I had cultivated a certain tolerance or patience for bullshit, if I stopped calling him out, if I responded to his moods with steadied calm, instead of anger, perhaps I could have suffered myself to make things work. I felt, for an admixture of reasons, that it fell on me to man up and fix it. And I knew on some level that if only I had quieted myself, learned to keep my mouth shut, if I had been more agreeable, less insistent, things could have worked. Had he done the same, things could have worked. But we were no more capable of these things than anyone else is of changing his essence.

Don't misunderstand. I wanted things to work, wanted them to work terribly. I would have contorted my personality into any arthritic shape I could muster to make things feasible. I would have changed myself. I don't think it was possible. And I'm glad. Fighting my essential nature has never worked; trying to change another's is not an option.

Maybe I am cynical, or lazy, or vicodin-high, and but I don't think relationships are supposed to be so laborious. Speaking in broad strokes, I believe relationships work or they don't; they make sense or they don't; they feel right or they don't. When they do, you hold on. When they don't, you let go.

And perhaps it's reductive, maybe it fails to account for exceptions and compelling reasons and extenuating circumstances, but I believe my theory has teeth.

The people may very well be complicated, messy, uncontained and full of contradiction, and that's amazing, that is my kind of life, those are my kind of people, but the relationship itself should not be any of these things. It shouldn't involve too much chowchow, too much confusion or effort, too much questioning or compromise or exertion. I don't think it requires any great insight into the self. You don't decide is this right? so much as you know. When it makes sense, you just know.