in the mood for love

My mom has often worried aloud that it is my parents’ divorce (or, as I might put it, their twenty-two-year-long bad marriage) that lies at the heart of me almost always being single. I’ve tried to assure her that that isn’t so; that I never concluded that marriage was something to avoid. Yet the older I get, and the longer I remain perpetually single, the more I recognize the role my parents played in shaping my thinking about romantic partnership.

I remember seeing my parents kiss once, and only once. That night my dad brought my mother flowers—a large bouquet, probably of roses—and gave them to her in the kitchen. I don’t recall the ensuing kiss lasting very long; but afterward, I think they were smiling. I couldn’t tell you if there were other romantic moments in their marriage; if so, I wasn’t privy to them. There were certainly plenty of fine days, when we enjoyed pleasant family time together along the pine-needled paths of a mountainside or beneath the dark sky of a summer night. But something I never witnessed—had no model for, no real understanding of—was the two of them making decisions together, operating as a unit together. I think of them more in their individual happy places, introducing me each to their own true loves. My mother spent so many hours of my childhood kicking and pulling pottery into beautiful forms, gardening, painting, cooking. My father would entertain us in his study, connecting our Apple IIe to the tv so we could play Frogger and PacMan at his feet while he solved equations on yellow sheets of lined paper; letting us shoot marbles around him in the living room while he paced across the carpet, considering questions of theoretical physics; taking us into the woods of north Georgia and showing us trilia and may apples and the footprints of muskrats. Their passions converged only in nature and Bob Dylan. Their backgrounds—strikingly similar, both with foreign-born Jewish mothers who shed their religion in the light of anti-Semitism and, after coming to the United States, became chemists, and married chemists, and decided in the 1950s to send their children to Unitarian Sunday school to help them fit in; their strikingly similar backgrounds were the thing, I think, that must have drawn them together when they met as PhD students at the same university.

But those commonalities never seemed to suffice in terms of marriage, despite my parents clearly feeling both love and intellectual respect for each other. If I learned one thing from their marriage, it’s that all the love and respect in the world amounts to squat if you can’t actively show it in a productive way; if you can’t change yourself to meet the mutual needs of the two people in love; if you don’t want to change yourself to be half of a dyad committed in love. And because they didn’t seem to want that unification of their two worlds, and because the marriage they did have was so painful for us all, I ended up believing in individualism and independence so much that perhaps, despite all kinds of pining away for certain guys, I never formed a true desire for a relationship at a young age. What I wanted from dating as a teenager and in my early twenties was not the building of a world together—that was so far from my understanding of how life works; all I wanted was to love and be loved. The terror my mother felt about being able to support herself after her divorce had left me fully committed, at age fifteen, to making sure that I could always take care of myself; expecting someone else to do that was not part of any life equation in my mind. When I did fall in love with someone toward the end of college, I think that commitment to thriving on my own may have prevented the magical-seeming development between us from landing where it seemed all along to be heading; may have prevented me from fully letting him in. Being able to identify what doesn’t work isn’t the same as understanding how to pull off the thing that would; I think I was both scared of love and oblivious to how to do it. Though I value immensely my ability to know what I need to be happy all on my own, perhaps in strengthening a part of me up to achieve that I also built walls that kept me from seeing something that so many other people take for granted. It is only in my thirties that I have decided I might not just not mind but also would actually like and truly want to share my world, my heart, my choices with someone else. Having had no model of a strong marriage until my adult years, when my brother and certain friends undertook relationships that I admire, I’ve only recently begun to be able to think of being part of a pair as a good thing without eliciting in myself feelings of guilt.

Having concluded that I would like to get married, that I actively hope to meet someone for whom I am happy to give up some of my independence, is a big step for this girl writing to you right now. It’s a big deal for me to be feeling as I have been this past week. It’s not about the particular person whose visit stimulated these emotions; rather, it’s about me seeing my own comfort in both being playful and sweet with him. It’s about an awakening. After all these years on my own, the prospect that I could one day delight in sharing my world with another now leaves me absolutely, positively in the mood for love.