Come in! Come in!

Come in! Come in!

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Last week I ended a long relationship with a good man I love. He wasn’t cruel or duplicitous. He didn’t betray me. You might wonder, therefore, what the hell I was thinking. Trust me, I also thought (more than once), What the hell am I thinking, ending a good enough relationship with a good man?

But the truth is more complicated than simple binaries of good or bad. We discussed ambition recently, he and I. He came down against it. But when the time came I had to admit that, while I may not be ambitious about many things, I am ambitious about the depth and quality of my intimacies. And I wanted more– more than he did and more than he was capable of. I have finally reached a point in my life when I’m capable of properly stewarding my own desire and admitting to myself that I’m not going to get it here— in this place, at this time. I can also finally appreciate that it’s better to walk away at the moment when I will only be deeply sad, but not yet angry.

Because that’s the other part of the truth, the perhaps uglier part of my own truth, which has no more to do with him, ironically, than his inability to meet my needs had anything to do with me. For me, emotional unavailability has always been like catnip. The reasons for it have been different in every case (though I suspect, at the core, they all boil down to patriarchy). However, my response to it has always been the same: try harder. Try to love them out of it. Try to convince them I’m worth enough to make the effort. Dance and dance and dance until my feet fall off, drunk on intermittent moments of appreciative applause from an audience that mostly acts as if they just stumbled in to get out of the rain and might just step out again as soon as the sky clears.

I have always been willful in these circumstances, painfully so, and prone to rage and resentment when required to submit to some other reality than the one I’m doing my damndest to earn. I’ve spent years convinced that I can bend the world to my will, that I can get men to give in because my visions for the future simply make so much sense. I mean, despite every good reason not to be, I have managed to end up remarkably sane, so clearly I know what I’m talking about, right? Clearly, I know what’s up with all this relationship business. Clearly, I have a good plan I’m developing here, and wouldn’t we all be better off if you would just love me?

I have been more willful in the past than I was this time. More willing to beat a dead horse until it was no more than dust, which is probably the best way to describe my marriage. And I would have kept beating it until I was six feet under if he hadn’t found a mistress and announced he wanted a divorce. It’s deeply mortifying to admit, but true.

With the next man I loved, I wasn’t as willful but I was still unwilling to trust my own instincts. I knew something wasn’t right. For so long, I knew. But because an ability to lie is not among my many failings, I was unable to imagine he could dissemble so constantly– while we raised our children together, while we slept in the same bed, while we wrote next to each other in the office I built for us so we could survive the pandemic creatively intact. So, when the truth finally came out, when he tearfully admitted that he had met his soulmate online and had been with her for 18 months, (which didn’t even overlap with the 12 months he’d spent pursuing the soulmate before her who also wasn’t me), I had to admit that his betrayal wasn’t the worst one. My betrayal of myself was the deeper cut.

So, this time I can say I didn’t betray myself. I didn’t ignore my instincts. I didn’t beat either of us over the head with my visions of what could be or kill myself trying to convince him to love me more than anything else. Henry Cloud, in his book on integrity, stated that it’s the ability to constructively and honestly confront reality, to be fully present for what is. Or in this case, is not, in the end.

Towards the end, as I tried to explain the feeling of our relationship to a friend, to find a metaphor (because I always want to find a metaphor), I asked her, Has anyone ever short-sheeted your bed? She had no idea what I was talking about, and maybe you don’t either, but it’s a prank that I experienced when I was a kid. Basically, when making a bed the prankster takes the top sheet and, instead of tucking it in at the foot, tucks it in at the head. Then, about halfway down the length of the bed, they turn it back up towards the head, which creates a pocket. Then they put the pillows in place and the blankets on top. Looking at the beautifully made bed you think, That looks so comfortable. I can’t wait to get in there. But then you slide yourself under the covers and get stuck about halfway down. You can’t spread out. You can’t relax. You feel a bit stupid. Like you should have known.

But, what did I know, in the end? I knew it wasn’t horrible. But I also knew it wasn’t working for me, that I was loving someone who couldn’t love me back the way I needed (again), and I’d have to end it eventually. I remembered something author Liz Gilbert has said, that as soon as you realize a truth that will significantly affect someone else’s life, you’re honor-bound to tell them.

The more important metaphor now, which describes what I wanted and what I still want, is a house. I want to fully inhabit all the rooms in the house of myself, even the dark and dingy ones, the neglected closets, and dusty attics. I don’t want to wall off whole wings for fear of what’s in there. I don’t want to distract myself in any of the many ways we do that from the stale air creeping out from under the doors of rooms long neglected or unloved. I don’t want to act as if the rooms full of my oldest dreams– like how I have always, always wanted someone to love me more than anyone else– are too embarrassing to admit. Like it’s better to close the door on that humiliating madness and put furniture in front of it so no one will even notice it’s there, not even me.

What I do want is to greet the people I love at the door of myself and say, Come in! Come in! And I want them to wander through the house of me with curiosity rather than judgment, just as I want to travel through their self-house with the most loving attention, struck dumb by the complex maze of it all– the beauty and the mess, the surprises around every corner. 

Meditating on all my loved ones and our self-houses, I was reminded of this poem:

That is the way I want to inhabit myself. But I’m also finally able to admit that though I might want to run my self-house like someone drunk on Rumi, that doesn’t mean anyone else wants to do that. No matter how much I might want them to.

Finally (finally!) I am learning to be with what is. To let other people be who and how they are. To not hurt myself or anyone else trying to earn love or pretend I know how things should go. The truth is I don’t know much of anything for sure except for what I want, what I need, and when it’s clear that it’s time to take those wants and needs elsewhere.

I must also state, for the record, that my historic tendency toward willfulness, toward trying to manipulate, convince, and cajole men into loving me, toward obsessing over all the ways in which they are being so damn stubborn about not showing up the way I want them to, not feeling the things I want them to feel, are a truly convenient way to distract myself from my own avoidance of my own ambitions. How easy it is to tell myself that all my dreams would be possible if only they weren’t keeping me from them when really I’m the only one keeping me from them. 

An astrologer once implored me, Asha, please stop fucking around and do your work. I thought she was being a little dramatic. Surely, I could find some way around it, some loophole through which I could still do the same old shit and not have to grow or change– both of which sure are painful sometimes– while still manifesting all my dreams. But, damn, if she wasn’t right.