To Be Fair, Love

To be fair, I never really knew how to love. Love was just something I felt when the chemicals danced. I’d say to her, in a breathless, straining gruff, “I love you”, and in the beginning she’d smile ear-to-ear, hugging me tighter than I knew how to expect. Years later she’d respond in kind, eyes never leaving her magazine, as I graze toward the door in a silent suspension, waiting for just a little more. Love was given and received generously, as a child would serve tea to imaginary friends at her party.

Men understand love, at first, as giving our self physically. We push inside of her with the pure motivation of acceptance and vulnerability. We stray from temptation as it lays wanton before our newfound confidence. We often do as she suggests to ensure mutual satisfaction. When the chemicals dance there is no way but up.

What’s amazing is the complexity of being in love with somebody. It’s free to everyone. Like fire, anyone can pick it up and use it, yet there is no manual. It can warm the coldest of nights or level the most beautiful of buildings. Love is God, in that everyone believes in it but no one has met it. Love saves lives and love kills.

I don’t know how to love because I did it all for me. Men aren’t usually malicious, we just have intentions. Angles, perhaps. There was always something in it for us. Woman have angles too, but those run a more destructive course. Men project their fantasies on women, causing them to constantly refine and anguish. Women, however, find men they desire and try to change everything undesirable about them. And this is the template that life pounds every couple out through, because we know no other way. Some of us get on with it and some of us get over it.

When a woman dates a man, his life freezes still. He no longer matures because he has officially been accepted as who he is. Only single men develop, but merely as means for survival. The taken man has been validated in his current form. If he drinks nightly with friends, spends weekends in the garage and watches sports loudly, this is who he will be for the rest of his life. She will always love his teddy bear hugs, the scent of his collar, that night under the big oak tree, a bottle of wine with their favorite song and the true love they carved in stone. But she thought he would just stop partying. She thought he would want to spend weekends with her instead of his toys. She thought he would change, or that, through arguments and long cries, he would banish his habits for her. Unfortunately, they aren’t habits. They are him. He is that man; the same man she chose to be with.

I never knew how to love because my development was suspended every time I tried. Therein lies my narcissism with every couple I meet that weds before the age of twenty-five. They can’t tell the difference between the chemicals and a true partnership, one that will eventually weather the storm of monotony. They haven’t grown enough, or explored all foreseeable interests, and soon will have nowhere to grow but apart. Like bamboo shoots in the marsh, they will eventually need to compete for the same air and light, just to survive.

Love is intangible, yet it’s the only thing I have blind faith in. I’ve seen it work with others. I’ve seen their selfless giving and authentic concern for each other. I’ve seen their passion roar for years and then fall to a faint simmer, both of which were enough. Of course I’ve been all of these things, but never all at once.

I have seen love and it is meek; lying naked along the estuary, bringing a calm to the tide no mortal could ever fabricate.