Great Expectations

So many strands of disappointment, some barely noticeable, dangle from our hearts in the complex tapestry of a lifetime. Disappointment is a kind of loss . . . at the bottom is the loss of an illusion to which we were clinging. The only thing that can be lost, after all, is illusion.
—David Richo
"How to Be an Adult in Relationships"

Most if not all of us have experienced that moment of recognition when in the middle of heartbreak we come to understand that our beloved was not in fact a real person but primarily a creation of our own needs and imagination: insubstantial, fictionalized, an illusion. Sometimes what hurts most is that fact in and of itself—not that we have been hurt but that we have hurt ourselves by seeing what we wanted to see instead of reality.

Individual people are pretty good at eventually making us see their true colors; an inconsiderate asshole will be an inconsiderate asshole until we finally see the behavior for what it is. But it's far more difficult to sort out the difference between truth and fiction when it's not the person we're involved with but the notion of the relationship that our illusions are built around. Our only clue that we're trapped in an illusion may be disappointment itself.

My ninth wedding anniversary is coming up in a few days; my spouse and I have been "together" for 11 years. I think my husband and I see each other pretty clearly and have no illusions about each other, but I'm concerned that I may have expectations of my institutionalized state (i.e., "married") that are not fulfillable.

I was not one of those women who thought getting married was the key to happiness, nor did I imagine a lifetime of storybook romance. But I also never imagined that I would at times feel lonely in my marriage, that I would miss aspects of my single life, or that I would sometimes wonder if I had chosen wisely—or if I should have chosen at all.

This is not to say I don't love my husband—I do. And it's not to say that our marriage is an unhappy one—we don't seem to have anything to fight about, we don't have trust issues, there are no lies or betrayal or Dr. Phil-like drama. We get along well. We like each other's company. We have similar values and we're generally supportive of each other. I'm not entirely dissatisfied with anything in my marriage. But I sometimes still hear that small voice in my head, insisting quietly in a nagging, nonspecific way that this was supposed to be something different, something other, something more ...

Is this one of those illusions to which I'm unrealistically clinging? Or is it really supposed to be something more? How am I supposed to tell the difference? I don't really know. So I make dozens of little acrylic cast hearts with strange things in them—bits of flora, odd pieces of metal, scary hardware, and scraps of words and sentences floating in their depths—and I create video installations that are ostensibly of nature but always seem to include some disjointed human representation that underscores the disconnect between the fantasy and the reality of coupling up.

My Great Expectation seems to be that things will all even out, that either the little voice will stop because its demands are fulfilled or because it represents the emphemeral world of illusion. But I realize too that this expectation may be the product of another illusion, which can only be worked out by time ... and yet ...

In the end I believe we cannot think too deeply about things we feel. We have to live in our bodies and in our hearts in relationship to other people, not in our heads. If we live too much in our heads, we miss out on the juice, on the sexy I wrote about last week. Which brings us around to my second quotation of the week:

Like an echo pedal, you're repeating yourself
You know it all by heart
Why are you standing in one place
Born to blossom, bloom to perish
Your moment will run out
Cuz of your sex chromosome
I know it's so messed up how our society all thinks (for sure)
Life is short, you're capable (uh huh)
What you waiting, what you waiting, what you waiting
What you waiting for?
—Gwen Stefani
"What You Waiting For?"

Assignment: What are your expectations of where you are? What are you waiting for?

'til next week ...

–E. Marie