There is a point at which love has to become less ambitious.
It has to stop trying to win.
This is difficult because love has no respect for evidence. It will take a cup of coffee, a song sent at midnight, a hand briefly resting on an arm, a how are you? and construct an entire future from it.
And yet there it is.
You love somebody.
They don’t choose you.
This ought to be reasonably straightforward. We make choices all the time. Chicken or fish. Stay or go. This person or not this person.
Unfortunately the body is not consulted.
There is an ache somewhere behind the ribs. You wake up and for several seconds everything is fine, and then the information arrives.
Ah, yes, That again. You weep, you blub, you shake.
You make coffee.
There are various things one can do at this point.
One can negotiate. Perhaps I didn’t explain myself properly. Perhaps she misunderstood.
Perhaps if I become calmer, thinner, richer, stronger, more successful, less needy, more mysterious, more available, less available, better dressed, emotionally integrated and capable of repairing a leaking tap, she will reconsider.
Perhaps Thursday.
Love particularly likes Thursdays.
There is always some imaginary Thursday on which everything might finally become clear.
But eventually reality becomes rather boringly insistent.
She knows. You told her. She doesn’t want it. There is nothing left to explain.
And this is where love becomes interesting.
Because if I love somebody, surely somewhere inside that love must be the possibility of allowing her to choose something that isn’t me.
Otherwise what exactly is it? Possession? Persuasion? A hostage negotiation?
No. You let her go.
No final speech. No devastating letter demonstrating the purity of your feelings and the terrible mistake she is making. No carefully engineered silence designed to make her realise what she has lost.
That isn’t letting go. That’s another strategy.
You simply stop.
You don’t stop loving immediately. That would be convenient, but it ain’t gonna happen.
You stop doing. You stop feeding the machine. You stop asking the future to overturn the present.
Perhaps she will miss you. Perhaps she won’t. Perhaps one morning six months from now your telephone will light up with her name. Perhaps it never will.
Neither possibility is today’s business. Today’s business is considerably less glamorous.
Make the bed. Have a wash. Answer the email. Pay the bill. Teach the class. Buy tomatoes. Feed the cat.
See your children.
Put your shoes on and go outside.
This sounds like a disappointing substitute for love.
It isn’t.
I have spent quite a lot of time confusing intensity with life. Alcohol can do intensity extremely efficiently. So can sex. So can unavailable people. So can waiting for somebody to answer a message.
There is a peculiar pleasure in the uncertain reward.
Maybe.
The ordinary world struggles to compete.
Carrots have terrible marketing. Nobody lies awake at three in the morning thinking, Jesus, I hope there are carrots tomorrow.
But perhaps carrots have been unfairly treated.
The ordinary world is where almost everything worth having eventually has to live.
A bed you sleep properly in. A room with morning light. A balcony.
A friend calling for no particular reason.
Twenty-eight people in a classroom who have never met you before, listening while you discover that you still have something you want to tell them.
A cousin talking about Aston Villa.
A cat. My cat. Vicky.
Wednesday.
None of it provides the magnificent chemical rush of being wanted by the person you desperately want to want you.
Thank God.
Perhaps that is precisely the point.
There are people we love who cannot come with us.
There are people who love us whom we cannot follow.
There are marriages that end.
Houses that are sold.
Rooms we have to leave.
There are versions of ourselves that worked reasonably well for twenty years and then stop working.
Forgiveness belongs somewhere here.
Forgiveness is not declaring that nobody hurt anybody.
People hurt each other. Sometimes deliberately. More often because they are frightened, selfish, confused, damaged, distracted, horny, lonely, protecting themselves, or simply trying to get through.
Forgiveness doesn’t require deciding which one.
It means releasing somebody from the role you have assigned them in your story.
You no longer need to be the person who finally understands me. You no longer need to discover that you loved me after all. You no longer need to regret losing me.
You don’t even need to be wrong.
You can just be you.
And I can be me.
There is sadness in that. An enormous amount, sometimes.
Letting go is not the moment when the pain stops. It may be the moment when you finally agree to feel the pain without trying to make another person cure it.
That is considerably harder.
The heartache remains physical. Dull and stupid and repetitive. Sometimes you cry while doing something completely unworthy of tears. Sometimes the body seems to be grieving something much older than the person you thought you were grieving.
Fine.
Cry.
Then make the coffee.
The great mistake is imagining that life begins again when the pain has finished.
Life is already happening.
It is happening while you are heartbroken.
The children are growing up while you are heartbroken. September sunlight is falling through the window while you are heartbroken.
People are laughing in cafés. Someone is falling in love. Someone else is getting divorced. A football team is conceding an entirely avoidable goal. The cat requires feeding.
And perhaps loving yourself isn’t standing in front of a mirror announcing that you are wonderful.
That sounds exhausting. Perhaps it is something much more mundane.
It is refusing to abandon yourself. It is saying: All right. This hurts. Come on. We’re going home. And then discovering, slowly, that home is not necessarily a person.
It may be something you build. A book. A football pitch. A balcony. Carrots.
And one morning, perhaps, love again.
Not because somebody finally rescued you or because the person who left came back.
Just because you were alive, and somebody else was alive, and you met.
Until then, there is Wednesday.
Wednesday is not an accident or a backdrop.
Wednesday is everything.
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