Is one lover ever enough?
All around us there is pressure to conform, even in love. As we grow up and fall in and out of relationships, the pressure mounts to make a definitive, final choice: to select a partner and commit to a monogamous future. Some people, however, insist on keeping open their options for fresh adventures, new encounters and a multiplicity of lovers…
Anne Sexton, 24 Mar 2009
At heart Aaron was a romantic – a romantic with a colourful sexual history, but a romantic nonetheless.
We were sitting in the coffee shop, talking about love.
“The more I think about it,” he says, “and I’ve thought about this a lot, the more I’m inclined to believe that the way we love is deeply, painfully wrong. We give away our love and our time too easily for fear of being alone.”
The waiter, a young, attractive lad of about twenty, brings our drinks, and overhearing the conversation, gives Aaron a pitying look. At twenty, the most important relationships you have are those with your friends. Within a few short years they start pairing off, getting married and having children. You begin by asking what’s wrong with them, but as more and more of them fall prey to domesticity you stop wondering why they want to do this and start wondering why it is that you don’t.
Me, I’ve never wanted to get married. I’ve thought about it, I even got engaged once, but I kept putting it off. The marriage gene seems to be missing from my DNA.
“I suppose that’s true a lot of the time,” I reply. “But then, I don’t mind being alone.”
Aaron raises his eyebrows. “Really?”
He doesn’t believe me and the evidence is on his side. Over the last five years, it’s true that I’ve jumped from one relationship to the next, often with barely a pause between acts. I don’t know why I did this though – I can’t even commit to a hairdresser.
“I’m tired of relationships,” I say. “Too much drama; too much trouble; the cause of too much human suffering and misery. Either we don’t have them and we want them, or we do and for the most part we end up disappointed, annoyed, hurt or bored.”
“I know what you mean,” says Aaron. “It seems so difficult establishing the right space with another person, so much work, so many potential pitfalls, a thousand what-ifs.”
He shakes his head. “When I consider what I’ve let pass as love in the past – possessiveness, jealousy, too many rules and conventions that normalise everything that you loved and is loved in you until it has become base, facile, predictable and unlovable.”
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