Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 18/Aug 09:00

This one goes out to the one I love

Love is somewhere. It may well be in lots of places, but there are two places I have not found it: in the air and everywhere. The poets, philosophers, priests and Hallmark have it wrong. If it was all around, a whole lot of us would be much less miserable. A lot less left-for-dead in a world that leaves us feeling unloved. I’ve never for one second thought I wanted – or deserved the agony of – relationship advice. I go out of my way not to give it. No one wants it. Relationships are not cake. They are not made entirely of wonderful. They are made of what two people put into it. More like than not, that adds up to two simple ingredients: person one and person two. Since I’ve never caught a pair of cakes in a compromising position, I’d say the average relationship comes with as much bad as good. We have great admiration – and sometimes jealousy – for those couples who seem to carry off “we good” whenever we run into them. Then – oh, then – then there are the rest of us. We’re hanging in, hanging on, hanging by a moment. But what if most of our problems actually come from outside? That is to say, what if we think a relationship is supposed to look like something we’ve seen but that picture is not working for us? In The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, Claire Carlisle takes on what she sees as the split in one woman’s life. Mary Ann Evans (Eliot’s real name) is shy and homely, a writer who works hard and shuns the spotlight. George Eliot, when her identity is revealed, not only draws to herself instant fame, but also infamy. I’ve read biographies of Eliot. Her love life was not a mystery. I was minded to resist the book. Surely we, lovers of the writer, knew all we needed. This new line seemed, well, macocious. Of course I read it. However retiring Eliot may have been, she had a will of iron. Her personal life would be a scandal today, let alone the mid-1800s. She fell in love with a married man (George Henry Lewes) and he with her. Lewes’s wife was living with another man, with whom she was having babies with alarming frequency. No matter how esteemed she was as a writer and thought-leader, no one was inviting Eliot to dinner. A woman living in such indecent circumstances was not to be entertained (in any sense of the word). The invitations to Lewes did not cease. Eliot wrote to close friends. This was the life she chose. She didn’t stumble into it starry-eyed and on a whim. She and Lewes talked. They knew the consequences. They could not marry. And Eliot accepted. Throughout their lives they would support each other’s work, but Lewes knew he would always be in her shadow. And he accepted. Life, love, writing and all the things in between happened. After Lewes’s death Eliot continued to support his legal widow financially. Their relationship may have been unconventional, but I can’t think of a commitment to love greater than that. I’ve seen my share of how’d-they-do-that relationships, the ones that seem too good to be true. And somehow this never encouraged me to believe that such a one could happen to me. I worry about all the people like me. Especially the ones who’ve been like me from birth. No, wait, I worry more about the ones who had the dream and the dream turned on them. I have no idea who to worry about any more. People die from unhappiness in relationships and unrequited love. In 2020, the American Journal of Preventative Medicine reported intimate-partner problems as leading to 20 per cent of suicides. In 2018, under the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, Theresa May appointed a Minister of Loneliness in the UK. Yes, loneliness can come in all forms, but them as become miserable in – or not in – desired relationships are rolled in there. The thing is, we have more control than we realise. Problems of the heart need not be unsolvable because love does not look like other people’s idea of love. I’m not advocating extramarital experiments. I’m not advocating anything but thought and choice. There is a shape of togetherness that works for you. The thing to work on is understanding if you can have it and if your partner fits the shape as well. Love is a fine thing indeed. But not if you lose you in the process. The post This one goes out to the one I love appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.