My personal life is something of an enigma to my coworkers. This is mostly intentional on my part, though I have shared bits and pieces, (only occasionally and almost entirely contextually).
Typically, though, no one asks, which makes it easier to not reveal too much.
The other day, though, one of my coworkers — after recounting the struggles their daughter was having being “out of sync” (their words) with her married and child-having friends — asked me,
“Are you looking for a husband?”
My answer was “no.”
My coworker seemed taken aback by my quick and definitive response.
I was taken aback at their being taken aback. Of the slivers of personal information they have about me, they know I have already had a handful of husbands.
(How many more should I have? Don’t they cut you off at some point? “I’m sorry, ma’am. Only three husbands per customer. We really need you to leave some for the others.”)
So, what of my answer? My no is true and also complicated, because accepting my answer on its face suggests that the question itself is valid and reasonable.
There is a temptation to feel some level of defensiveness (or a milder sort of self-protectiveness, at the very least) in the face of such questions –questions that come from a place of discerning whether or not you have any plans to remedy something about yourself which the questioner perceives you to lack.
“Are you looking for a husband?”
“When are you going to get married?”
“When are you going to have kids?”
(Funny how no one asks me the last one anymore. I already have three of those. Apparently there’s a stopping point on kids, but not spouses.)
But are these questions really about the person being asked, or are they about the person asking them?
“This is my worldview; what are you doing to fit within it?”
The “are you looking for a husband” question is presumptuous on at least a few levels:
- That my not-being-married is something that might need a remedy.
- That if I were looking for a marital companion, that person would identify as a man.
- That the answer would be their business, either way.
My coworker asks me later if I ever get lonely, which I think gets at the heart of their original question. I tell them not really, as I have spent a number of years cultivating meaningful friendships.
Even that question has its own layers, though. What is loneliness? What does it mean to assuage it? To ease it? Is marriage the only cure for the loneliness of adult life?
My not really is shorthand for “Sure, I get lonely, but not in a way that getting married would remedy.”
I don’t tell them that often the loneliest I ever felt was when I was married. I don’t think they want that answer.
The questions I do not get asked are these:
“What does companionship look like for you in the midst of a life of growth and flux? What do you want it to look like?”
(Are there lives without growth and flux or is the ever-shifting-ness of my own life just more obvious to me, because I am the one living it?)
“What is dead cannot even be clung to (for it crumbles and changes its character); how much less can what is living and alive be treated definitively, once and for all. Self-transformation is precisely what life is, and human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, rising and falling from minute to minute, and lovers are those in whose relationship and contact no one moment resembles another. People between whom nothing accustomed, nothing that has already been present before ever takes place, but many new, unexpected, unprecedented things. There are such relationships which must be a very great, almost unbearable happiness, but they can occur only between two very rich natures and between those who, each for himself, are richly ordered and composed; they can unite only two wide, deep, individual worlds…”
Rainer Maria Rilke in Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations by John J. L. Mood.
Outside of “the confines of marriage” I have experienced moments of deeply, stirringly, quietly, un-graspingly resonant companionship. Companionship that defies the ticking of boxes. That defies containment. That breaks my heart and holds it gently all at once.
A companionship complex in its transcendent simplicity.
(Though even describing it as such feels both like cheapening it, somehow, and wildly overstating it. And putting it into words feels like risking its loss.)
And I have been my own companion over the years, contentedly journeying through the twists and turns of my ideas and thoughts.
It’s difficult to pay uninterrupted attention to the world beyond my own being when there is a whole inner world to traverse. Following the siren song of exploration and creation. And what do the people around me do when I’m off on my own excursion?
(Just the act of writing–just the act of sitting and tapping into the me that strings words and thoughts together–is the type of journey that has twisted others into knots during my perceived absences, my non-presence.)
I imagine being with me can be pretty lonely for someone who does not have their own paths to traverse. And putting down mental roots for the comfort of others is lonely, because then I miss me.
There is a loneliness that company can’t cure. I am the least lonely in the company of those who really see me. And see me without grasping me too tightly. Who trust me to be me.
And such being seen grows more precious to me with each passing day. And more terrifying.
Which is worse? The loneliness of being only partially seen or the loneliness of being fully seen and rejected for that fullness?
Too often at the point where someone has seen a sliver of me and built their own version of me around it that doesn’t match my other parts–that doesn’t match my reality–I turn contortionist to fit into the sliver. To fit into that construction. That expectation.
How many Golems have unwittingly been created through people’s limited perceptions of who I actually am? How many Golems have I left undestroyed out of fear of being seen?
“Do you think you aren’t enough?
Do you realize that you actually are?”
I do not want to dwell within the Golems of other people’s expectations any longer. It’s exhausting.
What will it take to smash the clay and set myself fully and unapologetically free?
kfw 2021
Undusted Corners 