ordinary joy
passion, familiarity, commitment, and can we have it all?
When I lived in Cincinnati after college, there was a rumor that if you see someone browsing the frozen aisle at the Hyde Park Kroger on a Thursday evening with a watermelon in their cart, they are a single person in search of a mate.
The various times I found myself there on a Thursday evening, I never spotted anyone who fit this description, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the whole thing was a hoax started by a bored store manager tasked with getting rid of the late-summer watermelon inventory.
And how fitting: it’s a communal fruit, probably the one fruit you wouldn’t buy all for yourself. It’s meant to be sliced up and shared with friends and kids at a backyard barbeque. So I suppose if you’re single, buying a watermelon signals that you’re looking for someone (ideally, to form a family) to share it with?
There is something endearingly nostalgic about meeting your future spouse at your local supermarket: a snapshot of a bygone era when you knew of maybe two people bold enough to get on O.K. Cupid and the limiting factor in the pool of potential mates was the number of watermelons in stock at Kroger. Fast forward ten years, and we’re flooded with choices, from dating apps to streaming services to Greek yogurt brands.
The abundance of choice has made it harder to make a decision, any decision, and feel good about it, no less the consequential choice of who to share your life with. Anyone who has been in a committed relationship has probably agonized over the question, “Am I with the right person?” You could rationalize all you want, make lists of pros and cons, but at the end of the day, answering “yes” comes down to trusting your gut.
It’s pretty unrealistic to expect one person to be everything you ever wanted. Does anyone even have such a clear vision of their ideal partner? More often, what happens when people fall in love is they meet someone who is a bit of what they’re looking for and a whole lot of what they didn’t know they wanted, which inspires them to dream bigger about the future. So, if you want to fall in love, it’s actually better to not know what you’re looking for, or at least be open to being surprised.
There’s a difference between falling in love and choosing a life partner. The latter involves accepting that not everything you’re drawn to in a person/lover/friend is what you need in a partner. When we hear about celebrities who seem to change their SOs like handbags, it’s probably because they draw very little distinction between falling in love and finding a partner. What they gain in passion, they lose in stability.
Commitment to one person is about accepting that you will never know what it would be like to choose someone else, and that’s fine because it allows you to fully enjoy what you have, and why not leave a little something to the imagination? (Personally, I find unfulfilled crushes thrilling and motivating.)
If divorce rates are any indication, falling in love is somewhat easier than staying in love. If I had to guess, for people who have been together a long time, familiarity is the strongest glue that keeps them together, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So much in this life is uncertain and volatile, why shouldn’t we take comfort in the familiar? In an age where attention spans are shallow, it’s a rare kind of intimacy to know a person so deeply. How anyone could get bored of a relationship after five, ten or thirty years is something I’ll never understand. To me, the best relationships age like wine.
I want both the comforting stability of a long-term relationship and the scintillating novelty of friendships that can expand my horizons. And it’s possible to have both as long as we can accept that our partner can’t be everything to us. Poly communities inherently understand this.
But you don’t have to be non-monogamous in order to experience both watermelon and starfruit. I find many people in my wider social circle attractive, and if I allowed myself, I could probably fall in love with a few of them. Whether I choose to have sex with them is a different story. Friendships can be more romantic than sexual relationships and no less fulfilling.
I keep returning to this Esther Perel quote from Mating in Captivity:
We seek a steady, reliable anchor in our partner. Yet at the same time we expect love to offer a transcendent experience that will allow us to soar beyond our ordinary lives. The challenge for modern couples lies in reconciling the need for what’s safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.
When we view our romantic partner as the end-all, be-all, we are faced with a false dichotomy, a choice between stability and passion, familiarity and novelty, comfort and adventure. But if we view romantic partnership as one important relationship out of many meaningful connections that we can form over the course of our lives, why couldn’t we have it all?