“Do you love him?” My Spanish friend asked.
I was in Madrid, talking to my friend about a man I’d gone out with a couple times and was crushing on.
“Love him?” I answered. “I barely know him.”
“Madre mia,” my friend said. “I’ve been in love with a woman for years and I’ve never even spoken to her.”
Life is different in Europe, as is love. There, you take two hours to savor every meal. Lounge in cafés until dawn contemplating the universe. Open your heart to the beam of light coming from another person’s soul and know you love them instantly. Maybe you know immediately, maybe you know in a year, but no clock ticks to let you know when it’s “appropriate” to feel it. Love shows up when it feels like showing up.
Europeans know there is no escape from the senses, you don’t choose when feelings come. Life brings suffering you can’t protect yourself from, just as it brings ecstasy. So just live it.
Thus, it’s been challenging being back in my beloved US where life is lived in crash helmets and knee pads. Where social interactions are conducted like business meetings, everyone polite, polished and putting their best foot forward. Where a woman can’t fall too soon and a man can’t call before three days without appearing psychotic. Where relationship is treated like a medical procedure conducted with steely detachment, rather than a gift.
My friend Kim is madly in love and ashamed of herself for it. She’s got a guy she’s lukewarm about and another she’s feisty for, but is avoiding the latter because she thinks it’s unhealthy to be so enamored. Meanwhile, she’s lost five pounds missing him. Apparently, I’m the only one she can discuss him with because I won’t judge her for feeling so “crazy.”
In Europe, if you tell someone you’re crazy about a person, they grin and welcome you to the ride. The last time I told my American friends, “all I can think about is him,” I was immediately diagnosed. The cure was to distract myself with work and exercise. Apparently, my friends didn’t see the smile on my lips. I wanted to feel this way. I liked it.
Have you not heard a love song, I wanted to ask my friends, have you not read a poem? This is what the first blush of love is like. Chaos and nausea and losing control. Seeing the world in only pastel colors and walking around with stars pouring from your eyes. The rest of life fading into oblivion as your gaze lands on one extraordinary person. When simply thinking about him is the most satisfying thing you could do with your day.
Like so many people, Kim is trying to manage. I see her walking the edge of her own immense feelings and reigning herself in, as if taking the plunge guarantees her drowning. She thinks she needs something simpler, less intense. She doesn’t believe enchantment might actually lead to something concrete and nourishing, so detaches from the magic to focus on practicalities. It seems Lukewarm will be her choice in the end.
“If you feel something,” I told her. “It means you’re alive.”
“And if it doesn’t work out?” She asked. “If we stop feeling something, does it mean we’re dead? Sorry, I don’t know if I can take that chance.”
My girl is afraid and if there’s anything we’ve done to ourselves in modern America, it’s cocoon ourselves in fear.
Who wants buttoned-up, hands-folded-in-your-lap kind of love? I prefer shoot-me-out-of-a-cannon, eat-you-for-lunch kind of love. I’ll take the delirium and the euphoria, the bedlam along with the soul-shattering bliss. Maybe it’s a fantasy and maybe I’m a fool. But I’d rather have one day of real feeling than a lifetime of dull.
I see this attitude so rampant in my friends, in my family…
I’ve always said, if you like him, go for it, say what you feel, do as you feel! People mistake this with being foolhardy. But the point is not to wear your heart on your sleeve, it’s to be honest; more with yourself than with the world.
I believe that people are too afraid to make mistakes or to hurt. But, hey, that’s life! I guarantee that you WILL hurt in life. There WILL be pain. But there will also be a lot of joy… the two together, the learning from these life experiences, is what conjoins to form “happiness”.
I’ve been happily married for 9 years and must say our relationship has been pretty straightforward from the beginning. Mind you, not *easy*, but *straighforward*. We’ve both always known where we plan to be headed with one another. And it’s such a relief.
And that’s all you can do: be honest, love, do your best. If it doesn’t work out in the end, sure, it will suck, quite possibly very badly. But if it does work out… if it does, life will be fantastic.
“Chaos and nausea…” That pretty much sums up my relationships.
“Love him?” I answered. “I barely know him.” The less you know about someone the easier it is to love them.
That’s been true of every girl I ever knew and loved.
“walking around with stars pouring from your eyes.” Awesome line.
To be fair it should be said that the average European does not stay up till the wee hours of the morning contemplating viz in the coming dawn (or at least not every day). Of course life in Berlin has got to be markedly different than Madrid I imagine.
Nevertheless I heartily agree there is an unhealthy preoccupation with safety and security in the U.S. Is that a relatively recent phenomenon, heightened and amplified in the post-9/11 world, or has it been on-going since the reconfiguration of the middle class following the end of WW2?
“eat you for lunch kind of love”
Ummm. Yeah. When you have been “eaten” for lunch, and spit out after they are done with you… me thinks you have a slightly different perspective about how wonderful it is… and perhaps the “lukewarm” has a bit more appeal than first anticipated.
I know I enjoy an “eat you for lunch” lunch. It tastes great and it’s less filling.
Another great piece of writing here, Laura. You really do know how to keep the focus, make us jump, and round it all out with a zinger of a closing paragraph.
Oh, did I tell you I also really enjoy all you say? It braces us up and makes us pay attention.
It’s a statement that puts me in mind of Romeo’s lines:
“But come what sorrow can/ It cannot countervail the exchange of joy/ That one short minute gives me in her sight.”
There’s nothing soft about that.
With a smile, Allan