Modern Love Rejected My Story on Valentine’s Day

by admin

 

I hope it was deliberate.

There’s just something so utterly amusing about sending out the don’t-find-your-essay-right-for-our-needs email on Valentine’s Day.

It’s not surprising. In retrospect, it lacked the right sort of novelty. Or was it just the simple believability question? There’s something a little far fetched about treating relationships as a story, a dramatic arc to be managed, seeing it slip into a crude socio-economics, getting blindsided by, what I am still not sure was, the real thing, years of heartbreak, the death of my mother and years of loneliness.

I think it was the happy ending that did it.

Yet meeting someone and falling for each other in Paris was just the sort of origin story you cannot cast off but by some modern logic only build upon and chase further and further. It got even more interesting when I took a job working on a luxury yacht. Getting my piece of all that obscene global wealth, flying her in where ever we were, always sunny, summery and gorgeous. The perfect twist for graduating into the 2008 financial crisis. My life wrecked then enriched by the very same financiers.

It looked great on the socials but I felt a strange emotional leverage with the long distance. As if our scarcity built up what never really was. As if our longing was the value and if the excitement ever stopped, so would we. There was a love there, but not one that could escape that awful frame.

And yet, it’s hard to notice it, or even care, spending a weekend at the Delano in South Beach because the yacht happens to be in Miami for an owners visit and we hadn’t seen each other in a while.

Did I stay in the relationship because I was already invested? What are relationships, really? How do you accurately value one? An especially difficult yet intriguing task with all the other options I had, all the gorgeous, tanned yacht stewardesses with cute accents and the excitement of running off and living in another country.

Was it a cynical, utterly modern move, keeping the emotional support, bidding myself up with that weird desirability that only happens when you’re in a relationship with someone else? Watching the market like some sort of emotional arbitrageur.

There was fondness and connection and the relationship could have worked. Still, there was a pause, some grand if hazy recollection of love. I was 17 and it probably wasn’t even real. What’s the likelihood of it ever happening again?

And like any good story. It did.

It was if all the years and little tales I’d told myself shattered in an instant’s recognition, as self-evident as a bolt of lightning. What I had quietly yearned for, scarcely believable yet before me and beguiling.

There was no way I could continue. I flew my girlfriend to France to break up in person. Was that just a way of paying off my guilt? Why didn’t I run off with the other girl? The mysterious Eastern European stewardess? Or was she just a necessary plot point, amping up the drama so I could finally get the emotional pay load for my novel? The perfect contrast of a relationship built on a thousand soft, hopeful promises utterly smashed by an intense, unearthly love at first sight. Was she a deus ex machina, springing me from an expiring arc or true love?

I’ll never know.

I felt a demolishing sense of betrayal, to have felt short all those years with my girlfriend only to jump ship when someone better came along like an emotional trader. It felt like I’d broken reality. It felt profoundly wrong. I walked away from it all.

Love felt like a story I could write but never believe or live. A mixed-media piece performed with brain chemicals and words that aren’t necessarily true but could be one day. Like the way banks create money by simply entering a credit on a ledger. All those beautiful moments I was finally able to buy for us, caught in that soaring valuation of us on social media, all that investment and equity — wiped out by an emotional market crash.

There’s something utterly perverse about the way economics spills over into the social: the sexual marketplace, the trading strategies and all the clever new coinages. It feels like dating and relationships have been reduced to the basic banking magic of getting more back than you put out.

It took a lot of heartbreak and anguish to really get such a banal observation and Sunday Styles readers probably would have little interest in the patently obvious. And yet, it’s there and the more I read about relationships, it’s getting worse. Something cold and inhuman surrounding the most profound thing a person can feel.

There was an awful certainty that no one could possibly make me feel like that stewardess on Dalmatian Coast. And for years all my relationships would suffer that corrosive logic, never quite breaking through that socio-economic, market based frame. It’s why I went back to sea and found a certain peace and delight, what felt and feels like the other last great mystery.

I never told my current girlfriend that I sent my essay off although I did ask her to read it as the latter half involved her. She asked if she could keep a copy. Perhaps that’s the thing about love, not the Modern kind, it’s so utterly simple and powerful. The only person who really needed to read it, adored it.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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The post Modern Love Rejected My Story on Valentine’s Day appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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