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I have a friend who for years insisted he would never fall into a relationship, at least not in the traditional sense. One of my favourite memories with him was us watching an elaborate fireworks display after an impromptu New Year’s Eve where we’d bounced from party to party, from bar to bar, surrounded by people, but always together. With an old year behind us and our whole lives ahead, we carried an argument back to his place that stretched the length of Melbourne’s CBD about the existence of true love.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’ve always been a romantic. I was born into a love story. My mum was a waitress in small town Wisconsin. My dad had flown over on a work trip, and was dining at a little restaurant on this other side of the world. After his colleague hit on another waitress, mum and dad became third and fourth wheels at this brand new couple’s first date. But, two weeks later, it was my parents who were sending love letters to each other via international post. They’d had a year apart, and four weeks together, before they were married on a river bank in Parramatta.
A couple years into their marriage, my mum was hit by a car and permanently disabled. My mum, a woman who ran away from home at sixteen, who got her GED on her own and sent herself to university, who wanted to open up her own ranch and ride horses every day, suddenly and excruciatingly needed help just to go down to the shops. This changed things; plans, hopes, dreams, all of that. But just the other day, thirty-five years after the crash, my dad scolded me for taking his side in a family argument because, even if he does sometimes disagree with my mum, he is “always” on her side. My mum said the same thing about him, but with the addition of assuring me that she was right.
Even through the worst of it, they’ve always stuck by each other. This has truly fucked me up, setting a bar for love so high it’s almost out of reach.
I told my friend that love is sometimes ridiculous and irrational, but always vital. ‘People need each other’, I said, ‘so finding real love is important’. It really was that simple to me.
Meanwhile, my friend was casually sleeping with a Wiccan. I can’t quite remember his argument in those early hours of the New Year, but I do recall a lot of scoffing. He was independent, self-assured, and repulsed by the audacity of exclusivity. I crashed with him, and we were lying in his bed, the lights off, two feet apart and fully clothed in a deliberately platonic, mormon long underwear kind of way, and into the dark he whispered ‘is this what marriage is like?’ It was a rhetorical question.
We cackled about this over eggplant parmigiana a few weeks ago. He’s been with his partner now for a couple of years, and I’ve been single for about the same amount of time. It’s not at all where we expected to be. A betting man might’ve lost a lot of money on us, or maybe he could’ve seen past the shine of our coats before life fired its starting pistol.
We were both idealists with different dreams. Mine was for stability, and reassurance. His was for… well, I’m not sure. Maybe a lot of sex? Or just that freedom to be, without compromise.
I don’t think either dream is less worthy, or even necessarily less satisfying. But it is strange to be handed someone else’s dream, or to stumble into it, weary from chasing my own.
I wake up alone on Sunday mornings, but I’m not as lonely as I used to be. My friends tell me I should start dating again, but it feels like a hassle. I have other things I want to do. I have plans I want to see through.
My friend scraped the rest of my eggplant onto his plate and we ordered a third round. Or maybe it was our fourth, I wasn’t keeping track. We got completely hammered on beer and conversation, total lightweights after years apart, living in different cities. We spoke again about true love, and found that our philosophies hadn’t swapped, so much as coalesced into a grotesquerie of experience.
There was no argument left in us, only a joint understanding that dreams die, and that this can be a good thing. I’m hoping that it is.
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A place for my weirder and more personal bullshit, if you're into that kind of thing.
Another insightful piece of writing, Kara.
You said ‘coalesced into a grotesquerie of experience.’ triggering involuntary lols. Thank you for your greatness.