Source material for this post

"Hey, do that thing I like."

(puts up with me)

oh thank God

(random unattributed Facebook meme)

I'll get where I'm going, but I'm gonna start here.

My parents divorced in 1977 when I was five. The less said about that marriage the better: suffice it to say its only product learned very early on what not to do in a committed partnership. My mom remarried in 1980; my dad's remarried twice, since. The third time's the charm for him: he and Heather have been married three weeks longer than Eva and I. 

Mom's gone. My stepdad cared for her for the better part of a decade as she slowly declined, and as far as I'm concerned he more than fulfilled his obligations as a stepfather and husband both. I was virtually shut out of my mother's funeral, which poisoned my last interactions with John. He had his reasons. They may even have been good reasons, I don't know: he never deigned to tell me. It still hurts that I never got to say a eulogy; that I was told to show up at a given time, half an hour after everyone else; that I was completely excluded from the -- whatever you call the funereal equivalent of a receiving line. Many of the people at that service had no idea Arlene McCallum had a son, or that I was that son. But then, I didn't act much like a son for quite a while.

Well before that happened, and in the most roundabout casual way imaginable, John asked Eva and I for our blessing to move on with his life. That was most uncharacteristic of him -- John never asked, he told --  but I choose to remember that moment rather than what came later at my mom's memorial service. 

I hurriedly told John that there was nothing to ask. He had every right to move on, and move on he did. He's happily remarried and retired now, and we have had no contact between us for about five years. We almost certainly never will speak again. I'm okay with that. 

Likewise my dad has inherited Heather's family, including grandkids I can't give him, and so I give him space, too. He could just as easily done what John did, but instead he made a conscious decision to keep me in his world, and Heather allowed it (she really didn't have to: his previous wife Lynne tolerated me at best and detested me most of the time.) I am  eternally grateful for this. I try not to impose on them. 

Growing up, the romance I saw between my mom and stepdad was omnipresent and obvious. He called her "Rose". They danced in the living room to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy album. (It's only now that I marvel: if you can dance to Yoko's caterwauling, you must REALLY be in love.)  I can't speak and wouldn't want to about their life behind closed doors. But I heard them exchange I love yous every single day and I could tell even at ten that they were by no means perfunctory. 

That my mom coaxed that sort of affection out of John, a stern man who usually showed rather than told his love, speaks to the deep love they had for each other. 

In the manner of many five year olds with fractured families, I blamed myself for the split. It's silly now, but when you're five it's clear as day and assurances to the contrary don't work. DaddyMommy was a single unit; Kenny upset one or both of them and now there is no DaddyMommy anymore. 

Of course, I now know the real reasons they split, each of which makes me question why they ever married at all. I can tell you that for all the victim-playing my mother did, and all the attempts to turn me against my dad...mom contributed. In many ways, in fact, she was the driving force behind it, something I would never have guessed growing up inside one side of that story. 

Dad and Heather -- I'll admit I didn't know what to make of Heather at first, nor she of me, and we've had our scrapes over the years. I loved her because Dad did, but only recently have I really come to appreciate why Dad loves her so much, and grown to actually like her. That sounds backwards -- doesn't like come before love? Not always. But listening to them banter and tease each other, you hear love in every syllable. 

Eva, meanwhile, grew up in a home where love was always shown and almost never spoken of. This is only me speaking, and I recognize my thinking is blinkered here, but when you're in a relationship of any kind the acts of service to each other....very important....but just part of the background of life. I guess I think of that little different from the obligations kids have in a home: you clean your room, do the dishes, vacuum the lawn and mow the bathroom not out of love, exactly, but just out of a sense of fairness. The shit's gotta get done and I'll be damned if I do it all myself. 

The words mean more to me. Always have. They're words you know (or at least hope) aren't spoken out of obligation, like the chores are. Also time. Time together is vital. Too much time apart and I get nervous in spite of myself, an echo of childhood. Maybe she'll leave. That's what people do when they decide they don't love you anymore, isn't it? First the I-love-yous go from reflexive and constant to rare and...is that halfhearted? 

But that's the thing about relationships. It's only natural that they...refine themselves as time goes on. At first it's all lovey-dovey and surprise visits and several Iditarods worth of mush...nobody wants that in perpetuity. Not even me.

(Well, maybe a little of it.) 

I'm "love" in one house and "hon" in another and if I hear my actual name in either, well, that's like childhood too, isn't it?"Kenneth Cecil Joseph Breadner, get your ass in here NOW!" I cherish the terms of endearment and use the same ones back religiously. I hope they mean as much to them as they do to me.

And here's where we bring in that article linked at the top, to show me just how unmanly I really am.

WHY DON'T MEN APPRECIATE ROMANCE?

I find this article fascinating for the way it claims men view love and affection, and the ways in which I very much relate to it, or emphatically do not. 

After the caveat that we're talking about stereotypical gender roles, we're told that men are the active partners in romance and women are the passive ones. Even when a women is doing the pursuing, she typically does it in a very passive way, by giving clearer and clearer signals that she wants to be pursued. Signals that less experienced men (such as myself) miss entirely, or minimize. The article ignores one big reason it's safer to actually ignore the signals: if you're wrong, the consequences start at mortal embarrassment and could, in certain contexts, lead you into serious trouble. 

But yeah, confidence plays a role. A starring role. After all, if you're gonna pursue somebody, you have to feel like she might want you to catch her.

I don't have that confidence. Never did. I compare myself visually to the Muscles O'Greasestains of the world and come up very much lacking. Their confidence seems cocky and grotesque to me: I'm gonna rape you til you like it. I feel a twist of nausea even contemplating that kind of thing, and consciously stamp down the few impulses I do have along that line. That's not me. At all. 

Give me CLEAR and UNAMBIGUOUS signs you want me -- "I want you" usually works -- and I can fall into lust distressingly quickly. I've hurt more than one person that way. I feel a kinship with the ancient Greeks here, who had several words for different sorts of love. The one you're likely most familiar with is ἔρως, eros, passionate sexual love, and those old Greeks didn't trust that sort of love much. They viewed it as incomplete. 

You want a key to my heart and the combo to my locked up confidence? Say something to me that echoes this sentiment from Evita:

I'm not talking of a hurried night

A frantic tumble, then a shy goodbye

Creeping home before it gets too light

That's not the reason that I caught your  eye

Which has to imply

I'd be good for you...

I'd Be Surprisingly Good For You...

(lyrics: Tim Rice, music: Andrew Lloyd-Webber)

Show and tell me you'd be good for me, and even more crucially tell me I'd be good for you...and I'll jump and do my levelheaded best to prove you right on both accounts.  Without that, I'm a dead ringer for J. Alfred Prufrock:

Time for you and time for me,            *notice: no time for "us"

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

(T.S. Eliot)

From the article:

...[T]he male romantic fantasy is to be shown that the woman feels the same way and stands by him when he's down on his luck, when the money's not there, or when he's not feeling confident....

Okay, so this is one of those (many) tropes that just doesn't ring true to my experience. Or maybe I'm just fantastically lucky. I have heard and read -- often -- of women whose love IS conditional. Supposedly many women "love" men for the things they buy them. I don't see even a hint of that in my own life, and I think that's because I don't "love" that way myself. Love with conditions attached is not love; it's a business transaction. So, and this does sound a bit cocky, I believe I've made my own luck. 

The traditional wedding vows say "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health..." and that's life. The only constant in life is change and if you're not willing to accept that you're not ready to have a partner. Eva and I have been through rough times. So have Kathy and I. Unless one of them decides my presence in their lives no longer serves them, I will be with them through whatever hells may come. John Milton says in Paradise Lost that "the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..."

That's certainly true, but the first half of that can be said of love (and the second half of love's opposite number, possessiveness and jealousy). 

And let's face it, sometimes the truest love is putting up with each other. There are very few saints who act loveable all the time. 

I chafe at bit at this article when it says "a man wants to be loved for who he is, not what he does". Well, sure, doesn't everyone of any gender? Again, the latter isn't love at all, it's a quid pro quo. "If you REALLY loved me, you'd..." ... run away FAST if you ever hear your partner say that. 

But it's very true that who you are is demonstrated by what you do, and that's where I've had to learn to truly appreciate all the little acts which I quasi dismissed as "background", above.  They are background, but they're sweeping, magnificent vistas, whereas their lack looks like...fog. 

_____

Fictional  romances I have appreciated are mostly but not entirely two pretty much normal people falling for each other. Not for me the standard knight in white armour. I'm not out to 'save' or be saved and this is no fairy tale world.  There are some exceptions. Jamie and Claire in Outlander...well, SHE'S reasonably normal but HE'S the 1743 version of Muscles O'Greasestain. Same goes for Roland Deschenes in The Dark Tower by that most romantic of authors, Stephen King. I say that unironically, because King also penned a romance for the AGES between "George Amberson" (Jake Epping) and Sadie Dunhill in 11/22/63. Two quintessentially normal people, with adorable quirks and relatable flaws, and their love makes the pages GLOW. 

I like romance. I like to show it, I like it shown to me, and if that makes me not a man somehow...whatever.