Alistair loves the river. Maybe because he is the river. Dynamic, invigorating, with an unstoppable momentum that can leave you in awe.
It’s not just me who recognises this. I hear this first-hand from his mates too. One Friday, a cluster of them — long-time motorcycling buddies from the UK — come to spend a weekend. Over dinner at the local pizza place that night, the three guys mention they have a WhatsApp group chat titled ‘What Would Alistair Do?’ Alistair didn’t know about this but is visibly flattered. I ask why, and as an example they cite a motorcycle trip incident in Europe a few years back. They turned up late on their bikes for a ferry crossing and, seeing the ship about to depart, resigned themselves to waiting for the next one, if there was a next one. But Alistair wasn’t having it. With a yelled ‘Come on!’ he roared off in the direction of the boat, racing up onto the car ramp seconds before it was raised. Stunned, they sped after him, and made it by a whisker.
It’s all very amusing and I tease him about his James Bond aspirations. But there’s also a side to this ‘man of action’ persona that unnerves me. Alistair is a force. A force, as I mentioned earlier, he himself is unaware of. His energy is immense; it could power five water mills. His love for me is overwhelming — it has a vigour that threatens to knock me off my feet, as if I’m standing in the current by the water mill’s penstock. And the absence of it … well, that has a potency all of its own.
When Alistair is not pleased, you know for sure he’s not pleased. The air crackles with it. When he is in a mood, it’s like a door slamming shut. He’s not an actual door-slammer, but he might as well be. There’s a sense of something severed, something leaving the room. Love was here, and now it’s not. It feels wholesale — not ‘Alistair loves me but right now he is angry’, more like ‘Alistair loved me five minutes ago and now he doesn’t.’ Oh I get it. I know this is my stuff talking too. But believe me, when it feels like it’s happening, it’s devastating. Like that moment just as you are falling asleep when you suddenly wake with a lurch in your guts. It’s like that.
It’s a curious thing, to embark on an adventure, to hurl yourself headlong into it — to tell the world and yourself, ‘Look at me throwing caution and postcodes to the wind! Look at me, a little carefree thistledown, blowing through the vast emptiness of uncertainty.’ Only to realise, when you feel love ebbing and flowing, that there is one thing which you crave above all others. Security.
These episodes where Alistair and I detach from one another, they shake me to the core. Why the ebbing and flowing? If I knew that, instead of this book I would be writing one called How to Stop Your Relationship from Capsizing and Other Terrible Nautical Metaphors. All I can say is this. Deep wounds make people act in unhelpful ways. And I mean this for both me and Alistair.
I am to learn that Alistair finds I am often aloof and my distance makes him anxious. My behaviour speaks to his deepest fears. Not knowing what to do with that, he turns within.
And my own fear of rejection, my terror of yet another relationship falling apart, make me interpret this withdrawal as the beginning of the end. It fuels my sense of isolation, and turns me into a small, frightened animal. A more resilient Maria would go to him, understand he needs nurture, not conflict. Being scared is making me unempathetic. But I feel emotionally unsafe. Here, in a place with no personal history to ground me, with few reminders of who I really am — only Alistair’s displeasure to reflect back at me a Maria who is uncaring, unkind and hard to live with — I am honestly not the ‘best version of myself ’, as they say.
Financial insecurity is only fanning the flames. In Auckland, while I was never prosperous, I always just about managed to keep my head above water. I was resourceful and proud of my self-reliance. Now however, I am in trouble. Soon after I arrive back at Alistair’s, my freelance work starts drying up, which seems like the universe’s tasteless little prank. Because it has never been an issue before; I am usually turning jobs down. Technical difficulties only make the little work that I do have extremely challenging. The wifi fades in and out, I can’t access the servers I need, and let’s just say I start to get extremely agitated. Alistair tells me, ‘Hey don’t worry … you’ve got me to look after you.’ He sees ‘providing for me’ as his job; he’s old-fashioned like that. This makes me recoil. Partly because I am more independent than I knew. But also because, like the dodgy wifi, our connection is not stable. Sometimes I say outright, ‘Alistair, we fight too much. You say you’ll look after me … but what about when you don’t want to anymore?’ This hurts him; it presses on more bruises that I don’t know the origin of.
You can see what is happening here. Two people who desperately need kindness, and desperately need it from each other, are retreating to their own corners to lick their sores and pick at their scabs, before returning for another bout in the ring. The sense of distance from what we promised ourselves, the disconnect with the marketing material — the Greatest Love Affair Ever! Never Too Late to Find the One! — only highlights the disappointment. This was intended to be a masterpiece; it was never meant to have serious flaws. Of course this is not how it is all the time. Relationships persist, keep stumbling forwards, because they are rarely made solely of pain. In between the hard moments are great shafts of light that make you believe again.