♥ {confessional, sweet battle && interrupted thoughts} ♥

what’s love got to do with it.

(posted on Saturday, December 5 by eii wyy nae.)

i've been carrying on an on-and-off conversation with a new acquaintance of the male variety who is going through a break-up & is dealing with the sense of dislocation that results from losing that familiar structure. he's trying to figure out how to be single again & doesn't feel as if he's very good at it. thinks he never was. i told him i thought that one of the underrated things about marriage is that in a lover, you’ve a witness to your life. someone is there to appreciate the moments, big or small. someone celebrates your accomplishments & helps pick you up when you fall.

someone sees the cloud passing across your face & wonders if you'd like a back rub or cup of tea. someone listens to your dreams & woes, validates your perceptions or perhaps reorients the way you see things. there are little love pats exchanged in passing, for no reason other than physically reinforce all the spoken "i love you"s. even when there's a relationship rough patch, i said, you’ve a sense that you're not alone in the world, that your presence, your essence, really matters to someone. {at least that was my experience when times were good.}

when a relationship ends, i told him, that foundation is gone. you're adrift without the anchor that everyday interaction brings. it's really quite an adjustment, one that's much more difficult than you'd imagine because no one talks about how everything just changes overnight. he said he assumed i knew i was a ‘romantic’, that his relationship wasn't like what i described in any respect though they'd had good years with some common goals together.

he thinks they just had divergent expectations & were never right for each other. he said he views love more pragmatically than i’d & the kind of pie-in-the-sky relationship i described just isn't something he's shooting for. ugh. mahn they’re so *censored*. god knows i don't think relationship and/or break-up is easy or that great relationships just happen without conscious intent. but now i'm wondering : am i intending something extraordinary. are my desires outlandish.

should pragmatism trump what i know is possible. should i lower my expectations & settle for a future relationshipin which i basically get along with someone, enjoy his company & share a few common interests. i don’t know. or should i hold out for "the real thing," that spark of passion & sense of having known each other from a long time ago, a sense of inevitability that of course we'll be together, even if it never comes around again.

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