A life spent waiting is a life spent wanting.
I had that potentially trite thought after overhearing the owner of this building say that one of the tenants here was getting married. I imagined that scenario for myself, the prospect of a woman moving in here with me permanently, the two of us making the necessary compromises and giving each other the freedoms we need to make our life together a source of happiness.
Then I thought about the reality of waiting for her to arrive, of waiting for the appointed hour at which the door would open and she would walk through. I could wait for that until I die. A life spent waiting…
One of the most profound yet obvious comments I heard about marriage came from a BBC piece about a young man who was infatuated with a somewhat older and beautiful woman. She rebuffed his every advance and they both moved on, meeting again by chance several years later. She told him then that if he had been in her life before or soon after she got married he would probably have had an excellent chance of taking her away from her fiancé and then husband. The marriage was initially a train wreck. But she said it worked after the two made the compromises and gave each other their freedom. “Compromise” is a word commonly used in talk of relationships but “freedom”, used as I interpreted it in this discussion, had such an obvious clarity to it. Of course freedom is necessary. Would it ever be said that you surrender your personal freedom to feed the marriage?
A marriage or relationship of mutual freedom and independence. Is it even possible? Of course it is. Not for me, apparently. I’ll die waiting. As I came through the door of this apartment earlier I felt the void of waiting for something that will never come.
In some people this discussion stokes an obvious insecurity, which is that “freedom” means fucking around. I could see where it might evolve to that point but fucking around is not what freedom means to me, not in this context at least. I consider myself constitutionally incapable of cheating on a woman. Indeed, the few situations I’ve encountered where even the appearance of the possibility that I might be screwing around was enough to cause genuine anxiety and even fear in me.
I dated a woman who, early on, said I was free to fuck anyone I wanted, adding that “all men cheat.” I disagreed but made no argument of the matter. I thought that as I proved to her that I was not like “all men” she would find me admirable. I have since learned that decency does not work like that. Being nice, being decent, it gets me nothing.
“I want something now.
This is the life I got left.
You know what I mean?”
Alternating between writing this and watching The Warriors, in which Mercy, the lead female character, just said the above words. Nice way to end this rambling.
