When I got home tonight, I was feeling a bit upset. For no reasonable reason.
Luckily, there’s a Big Big Love at home who loves me, and he was all up for going upstairs and lying down and talking.
First, we talked about a bunch of ways I feel I’m not addressing the little conflicts that arise as I go through life. These will, temporarily, remain unresolved and unspoken. I’m not going to go into them here because it’s not fair, from my perspective, to hold on to resentment before you’ve given someone you resent the opportunity to talk back. If all the talking is in my head, I don’t actually resolve the problems. That doesn’t mean I resolve everything, it means I don’t talk about it specifically in public before the involved parties know they’re involved.
And I feel pretty terrible about this, since I’m all about self-expression and dealing with your shit. My shit is more dealt with than ever, but there are still areas of, well, imperfection. Duh.
I’d tell you about one of them in a veiled and indirect way, but you might see yourself in that story, and it’s not about you. It’s about me, trying to figure out a way to be patient with my discomfort until I get to the point where I can speak productively.
Which is how I’ve learned to get along with the Big Big Love so well. I was talking with a colleague (okay, tonight) and he mentioned getting into repetitive fights with his wife. I suggested that if they kept having the same fight, they should just write down their parts on index cards and pull them out when they were triggered. While that doesn’t sound exactly like moving forward, the absurdity of it seems like a good or at least interesting way to break the tension.
And the Big Big Love prefers interesting to almost any other state of being, besides laughter and surprise. I think if he were giving a lecture on the perfect relationship, he might say, “Choose someone interesting, someone you can laugh with, someone who keeps surprising you.”
I think he’d really like the index-card method. We’ve been fighting the same couple of fights long enough that we’ve figured out new ways to approach them, and we’re really quite happy with each other’s behavior these days, so there’s very little reason to fight.
There’s almost no reason ever to fight, since fighting is not about reason (though argumentation is often used as if it were dispassionate fighting, but as Robert Frost said, “I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice“). That’s how and why what happened tonight happened; it never would have happened when I was in my early 20s, with any of the partners from those days.
Here’s what happened tonight: I got home feeling caught up in the bullshit of my head. I had messages regarding a) a complex plan for driving my sister to my son’s high school graduation tomorrow, and b) my friend N asking me to join him for a beer. (This I saw moments after opening a very tall beer that had been calling to me all the way home.) S and I discussed my burdens, we hugged and talked, he said he was glad to see me and missed me when I was gone (which I frequently am, at night) and he hung out with me while I made the appropriate replies to my sister. Then he said, “Go have a beer with N. You can put a stopper in your beer and drink it another time.”
“But you just said you missed me when I was gone, and now you say I should go away again.”
“Because I’m awesome that way.”
And so he is. I don’t know if he was quite that marvelous at 20 or 25, but I know that by the time I got around to him, he was fairly easily able to put aside ridiculous games and understand that if I chose him, I chose him forever, above all others, even if I’d rather have a beer with one of them one out of the half-dozen times he showed up in my neighborhood bar.
And writing about the Big Big Love was N’s idea, and writing this post was a condition of my beerifying, so all is good, and N is awesome too.
Who do you know who is awesome? Or who uses the word awesome, whether ironically or not? I know I don’t…