“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
Bertrand Russell
Last spring I sat in a circle of women and heard a wise friend say that she had been “withholding” love.
Immediately, I knew that she had named my pain, and ever since, the word “withholding” has been rippling in my life as I seek to discover just why we withhold love from those we hold most dear.
It took a bit of unearthing, but I’ve finally remembered when the “withholding” began. It was in the early years of our relationship, maybe even the early months, maybe even the early moments–when the force of love was too powerful to handle.
I remember the first time my lover was separated from me. For days we holed up in a nest built from two love seats pushed together in my father’s abandoned doctor’s office. We ate, made love, slept and showered together. We even worked together so that the days were filled with the continuity of our love.
Then my lover’s father invited him out for a game of golf. I never knew how long one could be. It was physically painful to be separated for such a large chunk of time. Next, my best girlfriends whisked me away to a concert in the city–for one of my long time favorite performers–but I was miserable until my lover and I were reunited.
Two months into this relationship and love curdled into fear. I didn’t like such dependence on another. It felt disabling and ominous–especially because neither of us was certain about the longevity of our coupling.
Another month passed and we headed out to the Rockies with friends. We each had to work day and night to survive, and whole days passed without seeing the other. Within weeks, we knew that our love had become a “forever”thing– and within that understanding, the anxiety of separation began to soften–out of safety and necessity.
And yet for years, we “longed” for each others’ company–so much so, that at times, we would feel the longing–even when we were in each others’ arms. “I miss you,” I would whisper to my lover in bed.
For practical reasons like life and bills and off spring, we began to withhold more and more of our love. Soon the anxiety we experienced when separated “softened” so much so as to be formless. We no longer felt the ache of absence though we did always enjoy our homecomings.
Over time, that joy mellowed into appreciation and slowly disintegrated into expectation. Our life together had grown monumentally complex, and deep love was set aside in order to manage the myriad of details of raising a family and tending a home.
Almost 25 years after our initial hours apart, our minds are more certain than ever of the enduring quality of our love, though ironically it is harder and harder for us to “feel” it.
While “for better or for worse” holds more meaning than it did on our wedding day, we now know that it’s the “flat line” of our lives together that is the greatest challenge to our love’s expression.
Thus we have begun to dust off the love that we withheld all those years ago– with the the hope that we can reclaim some of the exceptional vibrancy that once scared us into tucking it away.
This is the gift of loving into mid-life. With our hard earned individual “identities” so fluidly expressed, we can now fearlessly welcome the transforming power of love with open arms.
I read a couple years ago about “flat” that seems relevant here. The classic term “flat as a pancake” was examined in comparison to the actual terrain of the state of Kansas. Turns out that in the scale of a pancake is increased to the size of Kansas, the pancake is wildly varied in texture where as Kansas had a minor deflection of terrain. The same goes with an orange and the Earth. If an orange was the size of the earth, it wouls have pits and peaks many times the order of what we see between Everest and the Marianias Trench.
I’ve only been married for 8.5 years, but it seems to me that what is working here is scale. As pressures mount, as responsibilites slowly and lovingly bind us, we change our scale of comparison. The area of our loving grows larger and larger including not just ourselves and our lover, but our children, our friends, our homes, and our very routines.
Perhaps the witholding itself is a negative statement of how much love there still is in oneself to give (much as we say “Not too bad” instead of “Well” when someone asks after us). Your post is good food for thought and a good reminder that love is like fruit, it changes its flavor and texture over time.