Now: I am an affectionate man but I have much trouble showing it.
When I was younger I used to worry so much about being alone - of being unlovable or incapable of live. As the years went on my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen - because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.
Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting - the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times makes your harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable.
For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode.
The phone rings. It's her. I tell her a thought I have had. I tell her how strange it is that we're trapped inside our bodies for seventy-odd years and never once in all that time can we just, say, park our bodies in a cave for even a five minute break and float free from the bonds of Earth. I then tell her about the fears I had years ago. I tell her that I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.
She says to me, but are we ever intimate? How intimate were we really? Sure, there were the ordinary familiarity-type things - our bodies, our bodily discharges and stains and seepages, an encyclopaedic knowledge of each other's family grudges, knowledge of each other's early school yard slights, our dietary peccadilloes, our TV remote control-changing styles. Any yet...
And yet?
And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach out to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that we are drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know.
A phone call: I tell your mother that I know I've been feeling less these days but I promise that I'll try to feel more. She laughs, not meanly, but genuinely.
I say that I know life has gotten so boring so quickly in so many ways - and that neither of us planned for this to happen. I never thought that we would end up in the suburbs with lawnmowers and swing sets. I never thought that I'd be a lifer at some useless company. But then wasn't this the way of the world? The way of adulthood, or maturity, of bringing up children?
I am kicked in the gut. She says that one of the cruellest things you can do to another person is pretend that you care about them more than you really do. I'm not sure if she means this about me or if she means this about herself. I ask her, and she says that she doesn't know.
She says: I'm sorry, but I just stopped being in love. It happened. I woke up and it was gone and it scared me and I felt like I was lying and hollow and pretending to be "the wife". And I just can't do it anymore. I love you but I'm not in love.
I say: But I still love you.
She says: Do you? Really?
I say: Yes.
She says: Then I'm hurting you. Please stop asking me to say these things to you.
Why is it so hard to quickly sum up all of those things that we have learned while being alive here on Earth? Why can't I just tell you, "In ten minutes you are going to be hit by a bus, and so in those ten minutes you must quickly itemize what you have learned from being alive."
Chances are that you would have a blank list. And even if you gave the matter great concentration, you would probably still have a blank list. And yet we know in our hearts that we learn he greatest and most profound things by breathing, by seeing, by feeling, by falling in and out and in and out of love.
Douglas Coupland
Life After God: Gettysburg