On Holding a Torch

She is a vibrant, vivacious, smart, funny, spontaneous, unique gem of a human being. One of my favorite people in the world, and she knows it because she flagrantly stuffs her hand into the backpack I'm wearing on my front that contains my passport, electronics, basically everything I can't afford to lose, without permission in order to deposit two fried rice snacks she pilfered from the conference she skipped out on to pick me up from the station.

Anybody less than as familiar as she is to me, would have transgressed a most unwelcome violation of my personal space. There are few ways to create a nigh-irredeemable impression on me - but one is presumed familiarity - with her, there is no presumption. There's no stopping her really, she's a force of nature completely outside any superstitious pretense of control I could muster.

She has been married five years and is 7 months pregnant. I love her. She is possibly the most repulsive thing about me.

I take a lot of shit about holding a torch for her. Climbing out of this shit though, is no easy task, because I have two problematic commitments.

The first is born of the fact that 10 years ago when she and I were dating, our summer of love was punctuated with an endless stream of bad news she had to deliver to me. Back then, I got annoyed that she thought I'd be angry with her, despite there being no evidence I ever reacted with anger, ever, to draw upon. A decade of sporadic reflection, and favorable comparisons later, I now appreciate that when somebody gives you the bad news, while frightened that you are going to get mad and shoot the messenger, and they give you that bad news anyway, that's incredibly rare and as a result, I would never betray her.

Not that I'm in a habit of betrayal in general, I just emphatically would not betray her. And in fact, I wanted to revisit her gauntlet of bad news, and ask her why she in particular always told me what was up, even while afraid. 

And I was terrified of her answer, because I dreaded it would be 'because I love you.' That would be a terrible threshold that among other things, implies that nobody has loved me since. Fortunately, I could breath a sigh of relief when her answer was 'because it's easier.' Which seems basic, and it is, and yet something about the culture or environment I live in has made this empirical observation not the common sense.

Which brings me to the second obstacle. For some years now, longer than I've been quit of KFC and so on, I quit lying. (Though I did have a job that required me to constantly habitually fluff my pitch to render it palatable, not egregiously so though.)

And it would be a lie, and a betrayal to say I didn't love someone that I do. 

Thus there is a poor me, that turns my accusers pointed fingers back on them and says, no I'm the rational and mature one, and the people who give me shit for carrying a torch, for holding an ex in high regard, high esteem, are the romantically paranoid.

Because as near as I can imagine, there's a persistent narrative: something like you are supposed to seek 'the one' in life, often by running a gauntlet of mismatched suitors, learning as you go until you meet someone so wonderful, you become permanently happy and all the troublesome partners from your past are revealed as asshats by comparison.

If that narrative ever rings true, it is by accident.

For one thing, a lot of people don't learn as they go. They unconsciously select for partners behaviorally identical to the last and keep repeating a cycle that they either eventually settle for due to biological clock factors, or waste their lives not learning.

As one relationship counselor quite eloquently put it 'We all have this story, often inherited from childhood, from our parents, that didn't end well. And we go into adult relationships trying to change the end of that story, but you shouldn't try to change the ending, change the beginning.'

Anyway, that's a digression into attachment theory, but the plight of romantics is very real and quite serious. 

The second thing is, that you can be lucky and obtain a reciprocal unconditional love. One that rivals a healthy mother-child relationship. Where you meet someone and you know that you will always have their back just as they have yours. 

And yet...

See if someone was to find me on what ostensibly resembles a holiday and chastise me for sitting at my desk for hours drawing each day by saying 'tohm, there's more to life than work you know, there's also love!' For one thing, I would know, and probably not treat their question as rhetorical. For another I would notice that by symmetry that the speaker is in fact also making the point that there is more to life than love, there is, for example, work. There's a whole bunch of stuff to life that one can make their life out of and about.

Hence all this other shit, can unfortunately come between two people who love each other unconditionally. And just because that love is unconditional, for example, it doesn't require her to only love me, only marry me, and only have a child with me for the love to exist in my person - doesn't follow that love itself is free from conditions.

It might be okay for a Pope to deny any affiliation with Jesus when pressed, but I don't think you can love someone and deny it, I mean you can call 'love' whatever the fuck you want. It just isn't worth much to me if when push comes to shove, that feeling is shoved down to put someone insecure at ease.

Allow me to simplify and say there's two broad strategies for dealing with a breakup or rejection - one popular approach is 'sour grapes' convincing yourself that the person who has theoretically disagreed with your own evaluation of worth, isn't a credible judge because contrary to your superficial analysis they are in fact a horrible person you don't wish to associate with.

My first real girlfriend, my first kiss 'cheated' on me. I use scare quotes because this dates back to when I was a naive romantic idiot of 16 years who had too much faith that my reason could overpower my emotions, so I had boasted often in our 6 week relationship that I didn't care if she cheated on me, provided she returned. Anyway, turns out I was a naive romantic idiot rationalist, and it broke my heart when she did inevitably hook up with another guy.

I copped some shit from my next partner for spending around two years brooding on this infidelity, but I'm glad I didn't 'move on' and denounce her, dismiss her etc. because after two years I finally figured out that I didn't hate her, I got hurt because I loved her. And nothing, nothing on Earth feels better than realizing you love something you thought you hated.

In other words, it's the acrimonious reaction. Perhaps most often enacted as a farce that has to play out for some time until the ego is sufficiently and independently restored to a point where they can actually accept the fact of their rejection, and let's hope their acrimony hasn't yielded too many burned bridges in the meantime - say through revenge porn or something.

The other, I would guesstimate, less popular strategy is to 'count one's blessings'. Where instead of fixating on the losses, focus on the benefits gained or accrued from the period of dating or crushing on this person. To thoroughly interrogate just how little one has lost in the loss of this person's affections or ability to speculate there-on. In the face of loss, to basically take stock and exercise one's independence to achieve the same goals.

I feel if it isn't painfully transparent, that the latter strategy is not just the desirable one, but the mature one. Not to begrudge anyone their immaturity, people get hurt in childhood, can't process emotions and thus their development gets arrested. 

What concerns me is that disadvantages compound. Getting emotionally stunted in childhood stunts one's development in adulthood. And the prevalence of emotionally stunted norms concerns me about the toxicity of the culture.

I liked the phraseology of Dan Savage when he said 'we have to stop looking at relationships where both parties get out alive as a failure.' or something like that, where in his context he was talking about the cultural hangover of 'until death do us part' but relationships can fail through no failure of the individual participants, as my first psychotherapist informed me.

Thus the insistence that I put down a torch, that is actually illuminating, in order to pander to the insecurities of a prospective individual is to me, an all around betrayal. In fact, I will go as far as to say from my point of view, to pander is to oppress someone. 

It is pathological to me, to suggest that if one has an experience that yield's useful information that at the cessation of that experience (of which do relationships really ever cease? so much as transform...) that information should be thrown away, or worse, willfully denied rather than used to inform.

For my part, I don't carry a single torch, but actually many. It's so much worse than the people bothered by torches assume. There are none of my former partners that I have ever become indifferent to, and none that I would be antagonistic to. Which isn't to say their aren't coffee tables in our history that we can bang our shins on, just that I have no emotional investment in turning those coffee tables into shrines to offer sour grapes up on.

In Mexico I've found myself listening to old recordings of my ex-singing. She has one of those voices that is not going to readily be imitated by the population at large, and it moves me. It's confusing, somewhat melancholy, but to some extent I need to wade through that confusion to orient myself to just how I love her. None of this though, impairs me from actually using my reason to move forwards, ever forwards.

These torches allow me to for example, recognize treatment that is below my esteem and dignity, because I have precedent that says 'others will not treat me this way.' and on the flip side, the number of torches I bear communicate something to those women who may want to sniff me out, provided they are in position see beyond their own fears and insecurities.

I struggle to relate to the mind that can't look at the torches I carry and not conclude 'this person doesn't throw people away.' further establishing as a bona fide that I am capable of falling in love for one, for processing a break up or rejection, and that the risk of exploring or being curious with me can be confidently estimated as lower than that of an unproven prospect.

It's not evidence that relationships with me (or for that matter, my former partners) will be easy, but one needn't expect it to be the kind of thing that breeds a new adversary, and shrinks the world through having someone emotionally dangerous to avoid.

I keep thinking of this line in 'The Terror' an excellent study in leadership and character, where survivors are debating leaving the sick and injured behind. The leader points out that whether the survivors realise it or not, it sends the message that if he can abandon these people, he can abandon them too. Caring for the sick and injured isn't just a kindness to the sick and injured, it's a kindness to those who care for them.

So, I guess, I'm left in the position where through my fervent commitment to be honest, and not acrimonious, I'm split between the desire to say 'fuck you' to the next person that diagnoses me as 'holding a torch' for somebody that I simply and objectively love, and wouldn't betray for the approval of strangers, and hoping that by example I can maybe inspire them to think upon the conventional wisdom of posturing, or even deceiving oneself as to the sourness of the grapes in our past.

I will concede this, as I use my conscious reasoning brain to move me into the endeavor of trying to change the beginning of my own, repetitive story (something harder than I ever thought it would be, thanks to the power of unconscious familiarity) I am actually afraid, largely because I've now accumulated a lot of women that I care about, care for and now they are starting to reproduce and create children that by extension I love and care about.

I picked up a self-help book in the Collins St Dymocks retailer around 13 years ago because it had illustrations of animals I liked, and while perusing it I saw a page that said the human heart has infinite capacity to love, and that has largely informed my attitude towards the risk of heartbreak. In my teens my mother told me that 'I was a catch' and to always use a condom because some girl might try and lock me down through pregnancy. At the time I'm sure I retorted with my contingency plan for such a betrayal of trust, but this exchange, while my mum probably can't remember it and would reflexively deny it, has largely informed my attitude towards the risks of attachment, namely opportunity cost.

Now is a presently confusing time I've trying to work out the logic matrix of just who's person I'd take a bullet for over the next person I would take a bullet for. It's like the parody of the Untouchables scene from Naked Gun 33 1/3:


But the point of carrying a torch, is that for me at least, it doesn't hold me back but informs my progress forward. And I do have a brain that in the presence of fear can just commit me to moving forward, which is what I'll do, and I'll see what happens, because I have a million fucking torches to see by.