fighting love

The other night I was at a friend’s house having dinner when, somewhere in the evening he disappeared. I had no idea where he had gone so I went to look for him and discovered him fuming in the kitchen. He waved me away with a gesture that said both “I want to be alone” and “it isn’t you.” I later came to find out that he had had an incident with his son.

I think about this encounter almost daily because I am so in awe of it. I mean, if I hadn’t gone to see where he was, I might never have known that he was upset, and this is so counter- what? Intuitive? to my own experience. I mean, when I get mad, I get loud, and consequently, everyone knows.

I learned this from my father. When my dad gets mad he gets loud. I’ve had other male role models including two grandfathers that never showed anger, at least not verbally or physically, but my dad shouts, and that’s what stuck. I shout. I holler and I cuss and I carry on and I wave my arms menacingly and, if you are really lucky, I hit.

I don’t want to get into that right now. I will, just not right now. Right now I want to think about something else. Hell, I want to think about anything else, but J. and I have been on a streak of fighting and I can’t stop thinking about it. Mostly I think about how I want it to stop and how powerless I feel over my ability to stop the fighting.

I mean, every married couple fights right? Put two people together long enough and they will fight about something. Here is something I wish I knew fifteen years ago, the trick of the successful marriage is not about love it’s about forgiveness. It is about forgiving your spouse and about forgiving yourself. Well, maybe that is love but it isn’t the kind of love they sell in dime store novels, it isn’t the kind of love you romanticize about in college, and it isn’t the love you think will endure forever. That kind of love ends up on the big screen. Fighting love? Well let’s just say fighting love is the kind of love that ends up quietly biting its upper lip in the kitchen while life goes on around you.

I am trying really hard to be gentle with myself right now, so I am not going to spend a lot of time telling myself how wrong I am to get loud when I get angry, and I am not going to spend time looking at anger and violence. Instead I want to nod to fighting love, because I think really I have a lot to learn from fighting love. I mean, my relationship with my spouse has not been without its ups and downs and so I guess from one point of view you could say our relationship has been the beneficiary of successful fighting love. But I am slow and I continue to fail to learn the most basic rule about fighting love which is… hell I don’t even know.

I guess I keep thinking about my friend standing in the kitchen. Fighting love doesn’t mean carrying on the fight. Fighting love is not about winning the fight. Then again fighting love is not about losing either. Fighting love might be defined as releasing outcomes and surrendering yourself to the process.

They say that unconditional love is unconditional. Fighting love must be part of that because any conditions you set become obstacles to overcome. I don’t know if it means anything but so often when I become angry I lose myself in the fight. I become irrational and belligerent. I suspect that instead of surrendering myself to the process I have lost myself in the process. I need to meditate on this more.

It seems I have been fighting a lot lately. I have this feeling that I am either a wet blanket or a wall of stone. I seem to vacillate between sucking up everything or putting up with nothing. Again, this seems to be shades of my father. I can almost feel myself acquiescing to his tantrums or alternately telling him to FO and die. I don’t know that I ever learned fighting love and so I have ended up with a love that fights.

I made some comment today that J. said was patronizing. I didn’t mean it as patronizing, but there you are. It could have ended badly, with feeling hurt on both sides. Instead we had a terse discussion that ended with apologies and a reconciling hug. Still, fighting love has a way of feeling a lot like fighting, and maybe that is where I have gone so wrong. I know the sensation of succumbing to the irrational feelings, the hurt and the shame that are so much a part of any good fight. I have those feelings and I have nowhere to put them. In a fight you neatly tuck those feelings into a blanket of anger and carry them around on your back for a few days, but when you reconcile there is no anger, there is no blanket. There is only the feeling that you have done your best, hurt feelings and all.

Probably the feelings of hurt and shame are residual and just need time to pass. I don’t need to wrap them in a blanket. I don’t need to tuck them in for bed, because in all reality they are unwelcome visitors, the remnants of past fights long buried that don’t belong here. Most likely I have called upon them, because years of experience have taught me this is what you are supposed to do when you feel backed up against the wall with nowhere to turn.

So I am unlearning bad behavior. I am standing in the kitchen, chewing my lip reminding myself that the person I am really fighting here is me, letting go of the fighting one slow breath at a time.