Dear Varun,
Since we have been married (only a very short time I admit), I have been thinking a lot about what it means to love. A crisis of sorts…or maybe it is better described as a reckoning…of my past and what I have been trained to think. I’ve told you this before but we are often taught that love is difficult, relationships are imperfect, they require hard work and sacrifice, and many, many compromises. And so I found myself often settling without realizing that was what I was doing. This is what it means to be in a relationship, I thought. Things aren’t like the movies. It is supposed to be hard and there are supposed to really tough moments which sometimes include shedding tears or angry words. But then I found you. Or rather our friendship became a different kind of partnership and all the things I thought about love and relationships was wrong. Love is easy. Love is joyous. Love is never selfish. Love is fulfilling. Under the love of a partner, you feel yourself blooming like a sunflower, fearless and free. And then suddenly it hit me. We are trained to believe those things about relationships and love because it is so difficult to find a partner than we match with completely. Often we only find “good” matches, that is someone is matches us pretty well but not perfectly. Then we work to make the parts that don’t match completely function as it should. It is like when you don’t have the right part of a project so you just put something together out of bits and pieces so that it works the way the part was intended. And it does. Sometimes it works just as well as the part that was supposed to be there. But it is not the correct part and there is a big difference when you place the piece there that was made for it.
I’m not interested in being preachy or even trying to really figure out why our relationship works. I think you probably have a better handle on those things and I agree with your points. Sometimes I have this fear in my head that this is all just part of the honeymoon phase and will fall part in a few months. I know that might be what others think. Deep down, though, I know that isn’t true because we have already had disagreements and we aren’t under any delusion that the other person is perfect. But how can I describe these disagreements to a person who has only ever known the kind of arguments where one person or both are yelling at each other or stop talking? There is no heat in our disagreements. Arguing with you is like arguing with myself. A more patient version of myself for sure but I can’t stop talking to myself anymore than I can stop talking to you. You have become a vital part of my body, my being. I have no doubt that if I were to get cut, it is you who would bleed.
And yet I am not so naive to not realize that part of the reason we can be happy or at least bask in this happiness is because we are privileged in so many ways. As the world burns around us, we have a roof over our head, aren’t struggling with bills, and have the support of our families. If everyone had those things perhaps they too could focus on what brings them joy. I told a friend yesterday that I feel so guilty about being personally happy when the world is falling apart. She told me that kind of happiness is exactly what the world needs right now. Perhaps she is right. It is just that I want so much for others to know this feeling too and I struggle with the feeling that I don’t deserve this much happiness.
How did you come to be the way that you are in a relationship? You never raise your voice, you never demean or demand, you never pressure. You told me that you had to train yourself but I still don’t quite understand how. Can you tell me again?
Love always,
Prea