Back when I was (more) awkward about relationships and sexuality, back at the time when I was, perhaps it’s more accurate to say, first awkward about relationships and sexuality, there was Truth or Dare. Answer a sadistic question designed to reveal your most private insecurities, inexperience, and unrequited crushes; or, preserve your tattered and inadequate history and public sense of self by agreeing to a dare that would bring voyeuristic glee. Kiss the least-liked person in the circle. Open mouthed. With your tongue. Let the most socially awkward boy at the party touch you while everyone else in the circle gasped in a blend of horror and relief that they had just been spared the dare.
Do you love M. G.? Well, who the hell knew what I felt about M.? I was 14. I pined for him. I couldn’t stop looking at him, watching him watch every other girl in the group except me. I dreamt about him. I craved his attention and was crushed every second he didn’t acknowledge my existence. But did I love him? An impossible question, as the truth was that I felt a million things in the absence of any actual relationship with the poor boy. I felt things at him, toward him, because of him, but not really about him. If he came across this writing now, he wouldn’t know who I was. He was merely the recipient of my adolescent emotional upheavals. My feelings lasted as long as they lasted, replaced by those for the next recipient. I couldn’t call it love and be true; yet love was the only answer I knew for everything on earth I was feeling. By “loving” M. I was spared being faced with truly loving or being loved by someone. I wouldn’t have known what to do with love. I would have settled for a sloppy kiss and awkward pawing. With these, I could have breathed.
Fast forward to committed adult relationships, ones that last for a really long time, and it turns out we still play truth or dare. The pressure to provide the right answer, the one that sounds plausible but leaves our innermost vulnerabilities safely sheltered, is surely as great now as when we were first coerced into finding one and only one answer to declare publicly. In adulthood, we find ourselves asking these questions, more, really, as a dare than an attempt to find the answer:
“Why don’t we go out anymore?”
“Why won’t you make love to me?”
“Do you still love me?”
“Do you even like me anymore?”
“Who are you thinking of when you’re with me?”
“Do these jeans make me look fat?”
I don’t know why, as grown ups, we continue to ask one another if we love someone. If someone were misguided enough to ask me if I love my husband, I’d have the immediate answer – yes, of course. But then I’d have all the other answers that make one answer impossible. I catch a look in his eyes or the curve of his mouth and I feel at home. I’ve caught a glimpse of him and been jarred realizing I have no idea who this man is. I have waited lifetimes for him to show up and make me feel alive and happy. I can barely count the seconds until he walks out the door to leave for work. I’ve been madder at him than at anyone else. I’ve considered not coming home some nights just to get a night off from marriage. I’ve worried about him. Pestered him. Kissed him sloppily and hungrily and wearily and greedily and offhandedly. Pawed him. Compared his way of doing things to mine and found his to be utterly foolish and lacking. Been proud of him, in awe of his mind’s alacrity. I’ve woken up with gratitude to see him, smell him, feel his bodily warmth so close to me; woken up exasperated at his very existence, his sounds and smells grating against my nerves. I live in the spot where my head fits perfectly nuzzled in his neck; I die of coldness and alienation when his eyes look right through me with dismissal. I talk to him, listen to him, project all my fears and excitements and dreams and disappointments on to him, take the weight of his projections when they come my way.
This love isn’t like any other love I’ve had. It’s certainly more inclusive of another person than my teenage crushes. It’s a better love than any that preceded it. An adult, grown-up, two-way love, a way-of-being love, not just a follow-the-swing-of-emotions love. My husband knows I exist. When he reads my work, he knows exactly who I am. This sentence alone is perhaps the reason I know I can so easily answer, “Yes.” I love him because I open myself to him, and he opens to me. I love him because I let him know me. I love him as I desperately try to know him. I love him because I keep letting him come back to me. I love him because he keeps letting me come back to him. Love – the ultimate in leaving and returning, sometimes within seconds.
Do you love M. G.? In a dark basement, with Hall and Oates playing, tepid beer, and the painfulness of being not-yet-fully formed, I was sure my answer was the deepest, truest “yes” of my entire life. The answer was so true that I couldn’t dare to speak it out loud and somehow jinx it. I chose the dare instead. I don’t remember who I had to touch or let slobber on me, but I have the barest memory of M., his brown eyes, dark wavy hair, the back of his head I saw so often as he talked to someone else.
I was wrong, of course. I didn’t love M. I didn’t know enough about myself or any other person to love. Now I do.