We’re sitting on a dirt shoulder on the face of a mountain watching a spectacular sunset; dancing hues of red and orange shine through passing clouds. A radiant ball of light reaches for the highest peak while I adjust my legs underneath my pillow and reach for my glass of wine.
I’m sitting across from her and we’re talking. I tell her my secret – that in my mind, I experience a dramatic, depressing, devastating, classically tragic romance that crashes and burns with everyone I meet. Its just chemistry, I say, there’s no reason for any of it, at least, not that I’ve found. So I figure crash and burn before it starts. Get it out of the way. Experience the end, mourn it now.
She looks at me sideways.
“You’re a little odd, but… weird looks good on you.”
“So you experience an entire relationship with everyone you meet and it always crashes and burns? Why not make it a happy outcome, you know?” She looks genuinely confused.
“If I made it end well,” I say, “the real script might not go that way. Everyone loves a happy ending. Making it crash and burns ensures I’m already complete with the unwanted ending. So it doesn’t matter how it really ends.” I smile.
“So you wouldn’t be upset if our relationship crashed and burned?” She looks even more confused.
“What relationship doesn’t end unexpectedly? Even when you know they’re doomed, you never know when they’re going to end. There’s always a glimmer of salvation that never pans out, and one day, bam, it’s over. The person you trusted with your life, the person you were so close to just disappears from your life forever.” I take a quick sip of wine.
“You really feel it when you get sick and there’s no one there to hug or to bring you soup. Or when you come home from work and there’s no one there to cook dinner for. No matter how bad it is, you never expect it to end. You could be two peas in a pod and have the best relationship in the world with open communication and total commitment, and something unexpected will make it end. So, experience the end before it begins and it won’t matter how it really ends.” I pause.
“Ah.” She says. “Does that mean you’ve already experienced us having a crash and burn relationship?”
“Yep. Absolutely,” I say, casually pouring another glass of wine.
“Really? how did it end?” A slight smile reveals her curiosity.
“Hmm…” I take another sip of wine. “It started off great. But then after it got comfortable I stopped doing dishes out of laziness and you got mad. I found out some random dude you met at the club kissed you on our anniversary, and I got mad. I became a major asshole after that and you lost interest. You said I wasn’t the same guy you met 10 years ago.”
I take another sip, surveying the valley of the mountainside below, watching her reaction out of the corner of my eye.
“You got tired of being the breadwinner and supporting my JNCO jeans habit, so we decided that was it. We were done. It was really tragic, you know, because we were so close in the beginning. Kind of like we are right now.”
She looks at me with a combination of curiosity and intrigue. “We were together for ten years? Did you ever remarry?”
“Marry?” I say. “Oh, we were never married. I’m not a marriage sort of guy.”
With her, I feel only heart-centered connectedness and I keep looking for some hidden want or need but I always come up empty handed. That’s why I don’t say anything. There’s no need. I’m content to just admire her genius from whatever distance she’s comfortable with allowing me into her space. I don’t even feel the need to give endlessly. I know that to be just another form of selfishness.
Still, somewhere, in the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder… what if? My rational mind always brings me back to reality. No, Dan. It’s a certain improbability.
The odds that are in my favor are the crash-and-burn odds. The odds that say I’ll be seen as interesting despite the obvious incompatibility, which will be suppressed long enough to create and explore that curiosity and then eventually that incompatibility will resurface, take precedence, and then I’m out the window like yesterday’s trash.
///
Why is tragic romance satisfying? Because it’s real. All that fluffy bullshit isn’t. Real people crash and burn; they don’t ride ponies with half-naked men into the forest of eternity where they’re fed grapes and fanned by more naked people. How being fed grapes by naked people became anyone’s fantasy, I’ll never know.
I was complete with the end of that relationship because I gave it my all. I didn’t hold back. I knew I was going into a crash and burn situation, but I went all-in. Not because I wanted a particular outcome. I wanted something real. And what’s real is experience in the now. Right here. Right now. It doesn’t matter if, when, or how things end. It’s all about the experience. You’re either all in, or you’re all out. There’s nothing in-between.
What makes us love someone with all of our being? What makes us risk being vulnerable? Is it only worth being vulnerable when you know the story will be your “happy ever after?”
Is it possible that love itself is made of tiny moments of vulnerability? That outcome has nothing to do with the purpose of loving another human being? So what if your relationship crashes and burns. That’s inevitable. That’s a given. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke up your ass.
What isn’t inevitable is having an authentic relationship with someone where you don’t hold back, where you don’t allow your trauma and fear to drive your decisions.
Who would you be if you loved people without reservation? You just might fall in love with the world.