This morning, my son Denali was telling me about a couple at his high school that had just broken up. Apparently, the guy got sick of the girl after two weeks of going out with her, so he asked a friend of his to break the news to her.
“Wait,” I said, “isn't this the couple who was, according to you, in a stable relationship?”
“Well it WAS stable,” Denali patiently explained, “But he's a man-whore.”
“Ah. That makes perfect sense,” I said, wondering to myself what a Good Mother (the mythical creature we imperfect mothers are always comparing ourselves to) would have said to her son in response. Would she have pointed out that it's not nice to call people names? Asked him why he and his friends are so fond of designating people as whores or sluts, regardless of the offense they've committed? Given him an erudite lecture about how his having prefaced “whore” with a masculine marker suggests that gender inequality is alive and well, even in youth culture? Reminded him, ever so gently, that each of us has a spark of the divine inside us, and that thus we are all equally deserving of compassion and respect – then handed him the lunch I'd packed for him (home-made eggplant parmigiana, wheat-grass shake, and carob-chip cookie)?
Last time Denali called someone a whore (in that case, he had been referring to a girl who had said something rude to him in class), I told him a joke:
Q: What's the difference between a bitch and a ho?
A: A ho fucks everybody. A bitch fucks everybody but you.
I'm pretty sure that one isn't in the Good Mother's repertoire. Oh well.
It's kind of interesting to be watching the high school relationship circus again, this time from an adult perspective. More than anything else, these kids are experimenting, playing at commitment: at that age, you can try on a stable relationship, and if you decide you don't like the way it looks on you, you can wriggle out of it after a couple of weeks.
I think one of the things I tend to look for in my extra-marital relationships is the opportunity to be a kid again. Maybe that means I'm immature. Or maybe it just means that I, like most people, am searching for what's missing from my life.
And what's missing is certainly not a stable relationship: Parker and I have been in one ever since we were kids. We started dating at seventeen, got married at nineteen, bought our first house at twenty, and were parents by twenty-two. My life is chock-full of adult responsibilities, and I'm not looking for any more commitments. In terms of my day-to-day experience, I suffer from a surfeit of domesticity.
Which is why, when Travis, whom I have been dating for about a year and a half, recently started fantasizing about all of us living together under one roof, I freaked: if he's in the house, who's going to take me out?
I'm beginning to realize that my committed self has her hands full, and that, for her part, Viny the commitment-phobe wants to keep her hands free.
This is something of a problem. After all, Travis is not suffering from a surfeit of domesticity. He's quite a bit older than I am, but he's never been married, and he's never had children. At this point in his life, a stable relationship is looking pretty good to him – he feels he may finally be ready to settle down. In fact, it's entirely possible that Travis was attracted to me in large part because of how stable I am. Maybe he looked at my demonstrated ability to maintain a long-term relationship, my minor feats of domestic prowess, the joy I take in my children, and thought, “This is what's missing from my life.”
Ah, the perennial problem of the human dyad: how can ONE relationship meet the needs of TWO different people?
The only solution: keep creating the relationship together.
Because it is a continual act of co-creation, a stable relationship between two people is necessarily (if somewhat paradoxically) a fluid one.
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