I've Seen Your Flag on the Marble Arch and Love Is Not a Victory March

The thought of facing the week without talking to The Only Living Boy in New York saddens me. Realistically, I know it's unlikely that I will go the entire week without speaking to him (and that isn't even really the goal -- the goal is to sort of phase him out in something approximating the natural cooling off of a friendship), but I feel panicky anyway.

Over the past 10 months, The Only Living Boy in New York has become my safety net. He's the person I go to with everything from the important to the banal. Beyond that, he's the person that I wish I was waking up next to every day. The problem is that while he comes to me with all of his issues from the big to the small, he doesn't seem to share my wish for us to be together all the time or we would probably be together all the time (or at least as much of the time as possible considering that we live in different cities). And the truth is that if you're in a relationship, it's a democracy, but the decision to begin or end a relationship is more of a totalitarian dictatorship. No matter how much I want a relationship to happen or what my feelings are, it's ultimately up to him because he knows how I feel and he's the hold-out. It makes me feel so small and meaningless, like what I want counts for nothing. I hate it.

In an old blog of mine, I talked about the nature and significance of soul mates, and I concluded that a soul mate is someone who moves the ball forward in a person's development but who creates too much tumult to be a permanent partner. I never thought that The Only Living Boy in New York was my soul mate because he didn't swoop in and turn my life upside down, leaving me to reorder it in a new and better way like, say, Doug Funny. He just came into my life and shone a bright and flattering light on everything. He made me laugh, and he made me feel good, and he became the person whose opinion I most sought on any issue. I thought that we would make a good team, that we had the right similarities and the right differences to complement each other in a lasting way. I'm not so young anymore that I think love is enough. If love were, as the Beatles say, all you need, then I would be married to Doug Funny right now because we loved each other even though we weren't ultimately compatible. But with The Only Living Boy in New York, I thought we lined up in the right way. Now, I think we don't, and it just breaks my heart.

I want to talk to him about this because I've grown accustomed to talking to him about everything and also because it's my nature to talk everything to death. (I even have this blog so that once I've exhausted all my friends and relatives, I can continue to obsess about things to my heart's content.) But I think the time for me to talk is over, and if anyone is going to talk now, it has to be him. I've already told him what I want and how I feel, and as much as I would like to belabor the point and tell him I love him every day, it's not a good idea if he's not going to say it back.

I'm hurting now, but I know that deferring dealing with the pain will only make it worse when I inevitably have to confront it. (Heartbreak is like credit card debt that way.) I won't pretend that I'm not hopeful that withdrawing will, as I mentioned before, cause him to stop taking me for granted and embrace the possibility of our at least trying to be in a relationship with each other, but I can't allow those hopes to become too great.

I am drawing comfort from one thing right now. I love asking couples how they met, and a large number of the people I ask tell me that there was a period of separation in the relationship before they got back together and decided to get married. In other words, it often happens that people meet the right person at the wrong time, so you can never totally count someone out. The actress Carol Channing is 87 years old and married to her middle school sweetheart with whom she reconnected after he read the nice things she said about him in her biography. If you can reconnect with someone after 75 years, anything is possible.