It always fascinated me how people go from loving you madly to nothing at all, nothing. It hurts so much. When I feel someone is going to leave me, I have a tendency to break up first before I get to hear the whole thing. Here it is. One more, one less. Another wasted love story. I really love this one. When I think that it’s over, that I’ll never see him again like this… well yes, I’ll bump into him, we’ll meet our new boyfriend and girlfriend, act as if we had never been together, then we’ll slowly think of each other less and less until we forget each other completely. Almost. Always the same for me. Break up, break down. Drunk up, fool around. Meet one guy, then another, fuck around. Forget the one and only. Then after a few months of total emptiness start again to look for true love, desperately look everywhere and after two years of loneliness meet a new love and swear it is the one, until that one is gone as well. There’s a moment in life where you can’t recover any more from another break-up. And even if this person bugs you sixty percent of the time, well you still can’t live without him. And even if he wakes you up every day by sneezing right in your face, well you love his sneezes more than anyone else’s kisses.
~ From the film 2 Days in Paris
I was chatting with a friend online the other day and she told me she and her boyfriend were making plans to get married. Usually I would be thrilled if I knew that my friend was going to marry the love of his/her life. But for this friend, I didn’t offer my congratulations straight away. My questions to her were: Are you really happy? Are you sure you’re not just settling?
The reason for my questioning was that, as of late last year, she had admitted to me that she didn’t love him enough. True, they got along well enough, having been pretty good friends for a long time before they got together, but she had never experienced feelings of passionate love with him. I guess different relationships work differently so maybe some people don’t need that kind of love. But I sensed that she would like to have that, having experienced those feelings before with a few boyfriends who had come before him.
But she said to me that she didn’t want to look anymore. He loves and cares for her, and he’s a really nice and stable guy. She said she liked that about him, having had boyfriends who were flighty and non-committal. She then sent me the quote above from the film 2 days in Paris, and said sometimes one just gets used to having the other person around.
Perhaps it’s too presumptuous of me to conclude that she’s ‘settling’, but I would say that’s the feeling I get from her. Perhaps her feelings have changed in the past six months. But what am I to conclude when she sends me that quote?
While it’s tempting to settle so you can revel in the comfort that there’ll be someone there, feelings of being trapped and stifled may surface in time to come. And if you can’t give yourself to someone heart, body, mind and soul, the other party will sense it eventually and could possibly leave you some day too.
Another friend of mine has advised me never to settle as it only brings emotional suffering in the long run. She says this based on personal experience. She married someone who loved her but whom she didn’t love back to the same degree because it was, as she said, ‘the safe option’. He was the kind of guy you would take back to your parents – stable, stable, stable. She also never thought she would be able to find someone she would be crazy about. But eventually she began to feel trapped because she didn’t love him enough, and now she has decided to get out. I believe it’s for the better.
I may be cynical about many things, but when it comes to love I’m still quite the hopeless romantic. I can’t give myself to someone I don’t love or care enough about. It wouldn’t be fair to myself nor the other party. I don’t ever want, and won’t, settle.
I can’t.