As children, our parents tell the story of their meeting in very specific ways, oftentimes coloring it as an idyllic "love at first sight" moment in order to convince us that their pairing, and its waxing and waning, is genuine and stable, reassuring us of their continued agreement to be together. As many of us know, this sometimes cannot sustain itself: the story turns to a lie in our eyes, as they break up and leave, or simply withdraw to their own corners in the boxing ring of our homes.
My mother’s story of her meeting my father was not so painted: They met in Greenwich Village in 1965, introduced by a jazz musician who knew my father after having knocked his teeth out during a fight. They went on a date. My mother says that she decided that my father was not right for her, and so didn’t think about seeing him again. But he persisted in calling her and because they had mutual friends and bars where they spent time, she couldn’t avoid him. Finally she relented, and said after seeing more of him, she fell in love. Soon after, I was born.
My father’s tenacious pursuit of my mother seemed romantic to me, heroic almost. Here was a man who knew that he had met a woman, perhaps the woman, and did what it took to win her. He wooed her and won, and that became a tenet of my own romantic philosophy: That sometimes you must press on in the face of indifference, or ambivalence, because sometimes no matter how much you know that this is right, the other person just hasn’t joined you there yet.
Now, having had my own heartbreaks, my own tenacity worn down by loss and betrayal, and those moments where you’re confronted by your own somewhat pathetic attempts at pleading your case to someone who might be swayed, but never conquered, I am less convinced that this story should be so central to my self.
And so I ask: When do you know to give up? What does it take for you to say that it’s over? The innumerable advisors of our times will tell you any number of points at which one should cut their losses or risk becoming a dishtowel in the house of love, but these pronouncements mean nothing to me. I am without shame, unbowed by pride as I present myself over and over to the objects of my affection, telling of the true and bountiful love that I have for them, and turned away yet again to descend into weeks of lonely distraction and a soundtrack of obscenely mournful 70s music.
My parents grew into a marriage that no one would want to emulate: a distance grew between them, of silence and loss and inarticulate longing that each one would be someone else, the person they had wanted to be with, not the person they turned out to be. I certainly rebel against the idea of becoming lost in that way, but I wonder whether I am condemned by family history to repeat it, because while I know with my head that it is an act of self-destruction to continue to slam yourself into a closing door, I still have this fantasy of winning, as my father did, the woman I love. It’s a building block of personal archetypography, and is almost impossible to dislodge without bringing down the structure of self that I've built. It’s a poor victory either way, but this much is known: you cannot kill the drive that makes us find one another. It can be twisted, or repressed, or channeled into some other pursuit temporarily, but eventually, it will rear its head and unless accepted and disciplined, will wreak havoc with us. If that much is true, then the circumstances can be controlled, choice can be exercised, and discrimination in its simplest form can be developed. But, still, I wonder if a willingness to surrender in the face of difficulty doesn’t then remove those people from our lives who might, in fact, be the very ones who we should be with most. How will we really know?
