10:00 P.M.
I AM ON THE BUS, ON MY WAY TO A DINNER PARTY, EATING A BANANA, when I get your phone call.
Ten p.m. is the usual times these come, although it can be 11 p.m., or 3:30 p.m., or noon. I am always ready.
The picture that flashes up is of you laughing at a party—bottle in the air, dancing. It was taken an hour before the crying started: The phenomenon of Dance Floor Collapse, where one song will come on that is so sharp, and so perfect, unhappy women start crying on the dance floor. Oh, there are always women crying on the dance floor, after 11 p.m. There is always a song that will end them. In the twentieth century, this song was “I Will Survive.” In the twenty-first century, it’s Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own”—a disco-knife that cuts down the secretly unhappy on the dance floor like a scythe. I have seen whole rooms of women broken by it. All sad women need to find a song they can cry in.
Everyone you know talks about your relationship—all your friends know what it is like. Because we are older, and wiser, we do not cheerfully slag your man off, as we would in our teens and twenties: We have learned the hard way that the ex-boyfriend we call “the worst person we have ever, ever met” can be your groom at a wedding six months later. As, indeed, he was. Perhaps this is why brides, traditionally, wear veils—so they cannot see all the knowing faces of friends who hate their partner, as they walk down the aisle.
It’s me. Hahaha, I know you know it’s me. Oh, today has been . . .
You start crying—the kind of crying where there are few words; it’s just sad-sounds soup with the occasional crouton of “he said!” or “I can’t!”
I am going to start as I always start: “Oh love, don’t cry. Don’t cry!” Actually, do cry—it always makes things feel better, in the end. Crying is like your heart pooing out bad feelings. You cry babe.
I know I’ve said all this before—please don’t judge me. It’s just a bad patch. He’s a good man really.
We all know that love can be tough—that every couple goes through bad phases. I can tell you, with 100 percent scientific truth, that even a good marriage goes through days, sometimes weeks, when one person spends their idle time imagining how they could move into the house next door to get some space. That’s totally normal. That absolutely happens. We are a multiplicity of people throughout our lives, and sometimes, the person you are this month will not get on with the guy he is this month. There are, e.g., some dry, hacking coughs that can make your love close shut like a clam—until the soothing honey lozenges kick in, you will feel murderous.
Hahah yes—I just need a Love Lozenge. Where can you buy them? I’m near a Boots.
But you, I think, ultimately, are not in a good marriage. I can say that, without fear I am wrong. There are no lozenges that will kick in for you. For when you describe love—the love that you have—you talk about it being something painful, and dark, and unknowable: something that leaves you feeling uncertain. Love as something that comes and goes at will, leaving you turned inside out—or else hungry and alone. You quote lyrics about love being a wild beast, or a force that possesses you, or an addiction, or poison, or drug.
There are so many poems that describe how I feel! So, this must be love, right? This is totally normal—I should not be worried about what I am feeling, because this is love, as described throughout time.
But there is a very important thing you must know: All those descriptions of painful love are descriptions of unrequited and bad love. These songs and poems are bad information, from lyricists and poets just as confused as you—perhaps because they learned about love from other confused poets and lyricists. They have passed on this bad instruction, throughout time, in deceptively lovely poems and songs. There are generations of tortured artists confidently talking about love when they have never actually experienced the real feast of love: instead, they are chronicling its famine cousin—love malfunctioning, unreturned, unrequited—and this is poor advice, for you.
You, in your marriage, see love as something to endure—like a marathon or a fight. Something that only the strong—and stubbornly determined—will triumph in.
Love is a test! You must show courage during the dark times! I will not quit!
But if love has become a test—this long and this hard—love has already quit you. These aren’t emotional GCSEs; there’s no certificate that will testify that you were a good spouse; that you completed all your modules, no matter what the odds. No one appears on the day that you die and praises you for having dutifully and dedicatedly withstood so much unhappiness. There are no Unwavering Wife Medals. No one is keeping count. There is no reward at the end.
Love—true, real love—is the reward now. That’s the simplest and most honest answer I can give you—that love is now. Love is today. Love is the last thing he said, and how you feel when you hear the key in the door, and whether or not you can sit in a car together, in the rain, listening to the radio, and thinking, This is happiness. If there is an afterlife, I’d be happy if this was it. Love is a thing you have—not a thing you will, eventually, earn; it is not something that appears only occasionally like a check or a rainbow. If it’s not in your house now, and most of the time, it never will be.
But he does love me. I know this. He absolutely loves me.
You will notice I will not talk specifically about him—I am not talking about anything he does, or says. This is because, ultimately, no one—not even your best friends or family—really knows what happens in a marriage. There are invisible strings and chemistries between people that cannot be observed—a marriage is like Schrödinger’s cat: What it looks like when it’s looked at is what it looks like when it’s looked at. It’s not the actual cat. So I cannot say with 100 percent reliability what he actually is, or what your marriage consists of—even though I dislike his taste in shoes and distrust the sour face he pulls when you sing, when you’re drunk. Like I said, no one is keeping count. No one will ever be able to tell you what your relationship is. There is no receipt. And I believe you when you say he loves you.
But there are two kinds of love I have noticed, over the years, and I will describe them to you—to see if you recognize which love he gives you. What love means when he says, “I love you.”
Go on . . .
The first is where two people create a big pile of love, together, and then use it as and when they need. Sometimes, you need more love. At other times, he does. But it’s your love, together, and, in the end, the amount stays constant—you’re just swapping love between each other. It’s an equal, communal effort.
Okay. And the second kind?
I have heard this love described many times, as if it is just as good as the first kind. I remember first reading it in Bob Geldof’s autobiography, when he talked about his late wife Paula Yates: “In every relationship, there is one person who loves, and one who is loved.”
At the time, I just accepted it: I believed it to be true. I thought it a fact. Perhaps that is the way of love? A yin and a yang, a nut and a bolt, a lover and a loved. I wondered, Which would I be? Which would be best? Which one would work for me?
I believed it right up until the other kind of love came along and swallowed me up whole, and I marveled that anyone would settle for anything else.
No. It is not a good love, when one is loved, and the other loves. For—how can it work? Who loves the lover? How do they get their energy? Who tends to them, when their love is all spent and they feel they can’t go on?
That love treats love as a commodity, in a marketplace, where there are buyers and sellers. It presumes some people simply produce so much love they have to give it away; that you are doing them a favor to take all this adoration and care off their hands. No. No. Love, in the most elemental analysis, is your time and thought: your days. You cannot give your days away without anything in return. They are all you have. You can get no more when they are gone.
Oh, I don’t mind—I’m a carer! I love to look after people! I’m a nurturer!
Although I have met men who have said this, they are few and far between. This is generally a speech given by a woman—women respond to being needed. Women are raised in cultures where they take pride in being needed.
Need seems such a similar word to want—we often use them interchangeably. But there is a whole lifetime in the difference between the words want and need—and both are, fatally, often used to describe love.
Beware of the person who says “I love you” but means “I need you.” Not “need” as in “I need you around to be happy, or amused, or comforted”—the luxurious extras of life.
No—needs you. Needs you for something they cannot do.
I’m not going to talk specifically about your husband, but—here is a very common thing: a man whose emotions have been crushed and suppressed. It is a sad and common fact that there are men who have been taught, from day one, not to cry, not to be scared, not to be anxious—the kind of boys who were told to “man up!” from an early age, and teased, or perhaps beaten, for their sadness.
The only negative emotions they were allowed to express, growing up, were anger—“Oooh, he’s going to be trouble! A little bruiser!”—although, of course, all those other emotions were still inside them.
And so, by the time they start dating, what they are looking for, desperately, in a woman, is their “other half”—the missing, needed part of them that can feel all the sadness, and anxiety, and fear. They need the desperate release of being part of something that can be heartbroken, or terrified, or on edge. And that something is you.
If you were in the business of neologism, you would call this kind of man iraphagus—a man who eats fear.
Do you know these men? I have known them. The men who absolutely break you—and then hug you, crying, at the end, as they apologize, over and over, and tell you they love you—men who seem now relieved by this outburst, even as you stand there, shivering and crying. It’s been a release for them. This is the only way they know to experience these cauterized, suppressed emotions—through you.
But that just makes me feel sad for him! If I can’t help him, who will?
While he’s using you for his emotions, you’re not having yours. You’re not an emotion donor. You’re not there to cry for the man who cannot.
But it must mean something that I love him so much! There must be something in him that is good for me; that I need. There must be some magic in him—magic that you just cannot see.
Here is the one truth I can tell you about your bad marriage: You don’t love him this much because he’s amazing. You love him this much because you are capable of loving very hard.
I cannot say this enough. It’s not him—it’s you.
But—what do I do now? He needs me.
Oh, my love: It is, I think, one of the most poisonous things in the world for a woman to be raised desiring to be needed. Every woman deserves to be wanted. I want you.
I want you to leave him.
And I know you won’t for such a long, long time.
I have to go.
I know. Talk to you tomorrow? I will talk to you tomorrow. But here is one thing I know for a fact: One day, you will stop feeling confused, or sad, or angry, or scared, and you will become, instead, just . . . tired. Too tired to do this anymore. Your stores of love will have become empty, there will be no more thoughts, or reasoning, to be had—there will be nothing left—and you will feel a simple weariness with all of this. It will become undoable for a single minute longer. You will be spent. It will be impossible to do this anymore.
That’s the day you’ll finally leave him.
And when that day comes, my absolute love, my spare bedroom is waiting for you.