We can't go back to the beginning

Happily married is a moniker to which I never aspired, but it's one I begrudgingly admit fits. Most of the time. Sometimes, though, I find myself yearning for something I can never have.

My crushes can be overwhelming. The force of desire and longing that is not directed at my husband continues to surprise me, even after all these years. It’s particularly startling because my crushes come in twos. Specifically, they’re all couples — couples other than the one in which I find myself. They’re not celebrities. They are not people in my life, who I see or know.

They are people who do not exist.

Settling

I’ve been married for fifteen years. I won’t say I’m ‘happily married’. The adjective sounds defensive, as if trying to bat away any doubt or challenge to the ideal of monogamy. I’m not even clear what it means: ‘happily married’. I’m certainly not always happy. And I’m not always happy to be married.

I never expected to become a wife. In 1989, someone bought me a Wedding Fantasy Barbie, but besides coveting her puffed-lace sleeves, I didn’t spend any time dreaming about the dress or the day. At sixteen, my parents’ divorce after twenty-six years of marriage left me bereft and cynical. In 1999, American Beauty became my favourite film — its unabashed critique of white-picket-fence success cemented my disdain for conventionality. I often declared loudly I would never get married and never have kids.

Now, only one of those remains true.

When I met Tom, I never thought of him as ‘the one’. I don’t remember a flash of lightning, or a halo of light. Instead, I remember meeting a man whom I simply, surprisingly, unabashedly, did not want to be apart from. And I’d never felt that before.

In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes about ‘the inevitability of settling’. He counters the common opinion that making a choice and sticking with it — whether in a job or a relationship or similar — is a failure of the imagination. Rather, he argues that living life fully means facing our finitude: we only have a finite amount of time. So to know whether a long-term relationship is fulfilling, you must remain in one. You must settle on one person, for a certain amount of time. He particularly advocates settling in a way that makes it harder to back out.

‘When people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually happier as a result. When you’ve committed yourself to one finite course of action, you’re much less likely to spend that time pining after fantastical alternatives’.

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks (pg 87-88)

I’m forced to admit that Burkeman’s argument has been borne out by my experience. I never imagined, when I looked back at the wreckage of relationships that followed me from my first heterosexual kiss at fourteen to my one-night-stand with a cook from a yacht in my late twenties, that I could sustain anything longer than a fragmented twenty-three months of coupledom, spattered with break-ups and breaks. And yet here I am, fifteen years later (sixteen if you count the pre-wedding part: we married eleven months after we met).

I love being married. I don’t love admitting this. I was much more committed to my identity as a city party girl, styled off an amalgam of the women of Sex and the City. Or an unconventional traveler like Céline in Before Sunrise or Alexandra David-Néel traipsing through Tibet. At the very least I wanted to be a single white feminist, with my own income and my own apartment and my own life, guarding against the possibility of dependency or divorce. Instead, I find myself a married, home-owning, co-habiting wife.

And: I mostly adore it. Waking up next to my love every morning, in the snuggle of warmth under the duvet before we have to get up. I relax into our shorthand, into the unspoken knowledge of us, that we no longer need to articulate or explain. I’m grateful for the thousands of stories I don’t need to retell, because he remembers them. That he knows what kind of herbal tea I take depending on the time of day or the time of the month. For our perspective takes on each other’s neuroses, with his insight borne of the years of watching me twist myself up and then come undone, and the sometimes exasperated response to that, too. Our mutual leaning against each another, like bamboo shifting in the wind.

But.

I miss the beginning.

I miss the not knowing. The breath-catch of uncertainty, when you’re not sure if he’ll turn back to wave goodbye. The wondering if you’ve said the right thing, and how you can’t know, because you can’t ask, so you can only wait, and hope. The first kiss. The first time a finger slides into a waist-band, the first skin-to-skin, the first night, the first morning.

And even sometimes, I miss the drama. The slammed doors and car horns, the hang-ups and the time apart. The ache of wondering if you’ll be held the same way again, or if that body is lost to you. The electricity of brushing elbows. The tender hollowed-out feeling when you realise it’s over. The uncontainable euphoria of the return.

That’s why I crush on couples.

The narrative power of tumbling into a beginning gets me every time. I relive my past loves; I remember my beginning of this one; I am transmitted into their heart and their heat. They gift me the remembering. And at its best, that transmission imbues my life and my relationship with Tom with that longing, again. It opens me up to the world, to love and loss, to feeling electrified and alive.

Jim and Pam (The Office, US Version)

My first hardcore couple crush was Jim Halpert and Pam Beesly. Classic unrequited love triangle: Pam, the cute, artistic receptionist and Jim, the funny, goofy salesman. At the start of the story, Pam’s engaged to Roy while Jim pines after Pam.

I’d rewatch their quippy almost adolescent interactions with a broad smile, leaning forward with my hands in fists, as if I could will them to kiss each other quicker. His head shake with his hands stuffed in his pockets. Her chin tilt and downcast yes.

Okay, okay, they end up married and co-habiting just like me. But that’s not the part I pine for. It’s the early days, when Pam’s still with Roy and Jim’s trying to win her over. They eat pizza on the roof, they kiss at the office Christmas party, they hide their incipient relationship from their colleagues while sneaking out for kisses at lunchtime.

I made the mistake of looking up Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski. At first, I wanted them to be together in real life, and I learned what it meant to be a shipper: a fan with a desire for two or more people, fictional or real, to be in a relationship. After awhile, I focussed my crush energy on Krasinski himself. But seeing each of these actors in their actual, real life had the opposite effect. I didn’t want Jenna and John to be a couple. And I didn’t want to be in a couple with Krasinksi, or even with Jim Halpert.

I want Pam and Jim to be together, and I want to be part of it.

I’d replay the scene of him dropping to his knee at a gas station to propose. Of them giggling when they drive home from work together for the first time. Of Jim telling his co-worker Dwight what it was like when he moved away from Pam because she kept rejecting him: how he couldn’t concentrate, or sleep, how even food had no taste.

These scenes tell me the story of what I can’t go back to. The tentative beginning; how they both can’t believe their luck; how all the mis-steps and missed meetings have come good.

That’s why I watch. To remember.

Connell and Marianne (Normal People)

People tell me their lockdown was hell. Mine was borderline euphoric. No longer did I have to trudge into a workplace that caused me nauseating stress and anxiety. I could blissfully strike everything out of my diary, with no obligation to meet all the people all the time. I could sit and look out the window at trees.

And I got to meet Connell and Marianne.

Normal People broke me open. Not just the sex, the searing heat of it. But the intensity of the space between them, the longing and the wrest. In scene after scene I saw myself: remembered that boy, that party, that time, that conversation. I replayed these formative moments through their particular plotline.

I am sixteen again, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. They are electric; I want to watch them fall together and apart again and again. Their chemistry is indelible. It catches in my throat, it grabs at my belly. All the desire and the sadness, and then the relief of bodies connecting, that collision of skin.

In some ways I was startled by wanting to re-inhabit a time of such confusion, and not a little pain. But that is it — I felt so much. The uncertainty brought aliveness, and clarity. And oh yes, drama. All these enactments, the imperative playing out of the pain and lust but the fear to step towards it, also. If it was all smooth we’d just stay with the first person we fell in love with. But then we’d never feel the loss, the wrench.

When they say ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’, they leave out the succulence of losing. The disappointment that salts the taste. The yearning that is necessary to recognise what we have in our hands.

Losing it makes it real. The pain of separation is worth something in itself. I broaden and am enriched by it. It’s here anyways. Let me feel it.

I watched them not say so many words. I marvelled at their restraint: I, who can never stop talking. But I realised the pain they cause each other by their silence is just another version of the hurt I cause with my words. Miscommunication happens regardless of what we say.

When I reached the end, I went backwards. I rewound the scenes so they ended up together that first time, in her house full of windows, in his plaid-wallpapered room. Then, I replayed only the scenes when they kissed. Then: only when they came back together.

I read Sally Rooney’s book on the rooftop of a bookshop in the city centre, alone in the world, the streets empty around me. Suddenly all the words they hadn’t said on screen came rushing through in the prose, and I was inside their heads, I heard the doubt that proliferated between them. I saw how their misunderstandings manifested.

It broke my heart open. I fell in love again: with Connell and Marianne, with literature, with reading, with writing, with melancholy, with the world.

Again, I looked up Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. But Mescal isn’t Connell. Too self-assured, too into running. Edgar-Jones has none of Marianne’s displaced angst; her beauty is too straightforward and clean. I wrote a note to myself, a reminder: ‘Don’t look them up on YouTube being themselves. You’ll only be disappointed.’

No, it’s Connell and Marianne I want: the memory of the push-pull, of running towards a feeling that burns you when you get too close.

Everything became more luminous in that spring and summer. This is the place where I want to live, a combination of arrival and yearning, of presence and longing. Uncontainable: you can roll it around on your tongue, but when you try to swallow, it’s already gone.

Connell says: ‘Life offers up these small joys, despite everything.’

Nick and Charlie (Heartstopper)

Tom away from home for work, and me on the sofa in the lounge scrolling Netflix. It knows I love my high school dramedies (Never Have I Ever, Sex Education, Clueless, every John Hughes film ever made) and my queer films (Call Me By Your Name, Bound, Mulholland Drive), so it suggested a new series of teenage LGBTQ+ romance.

I fell in love.

Binge watching in the dark room, laptop beside me, too enthralled to get up to plug in the cable to the big screen.

Partly for the halcyon lighting and the wholesome screenplay, the soft-focus filter that gives me a glimpse of a high school experience I never had. Friends who love you no matter what, when the longest fight lasts less than twenty-four hours, when your boyfriend holds your gaze and says ‘I love you’.

Partly because it’s so chaste I can only get half-turned off before someone pulls a duvet over their shoulder and the camera cuts to the next scene. It takes me back to a time when I all I wanted to do was kiss while we watched TV, when walking home in the rain was the most romantic move he could make.

Partly because I get to imagine an adolescence as full of love and acceptance as this one: in this alternate reality, I kissed my best friend in high school rather than stealing her boyfriend; here, consent is the hottest way to get turned on.

I don’t care that no one gets to actually live like this. I want this to be true: I want every teenager to believe they can be asked before they’re kissed, that the effect of any homophobia can be overcome by hugs and handholding, that mental health hospitals are full of supportive, resilient, well-paid staff, that parents apologise to you after an argument, that your friends say things like: ‘sex can be anything you want it to be’.

When I watch Nick and Charlie, I am just a boy in love with a boy.

While waiting for the third season to come out, I bought all the comics. I’d treat myself to a new chapter each night; Tom came to bed and found me smiling beatifically, in a state of contented bliss. They exist suspended, loving each other in a simple, straightforward way I was completely incapable of at fifteen.

Even when the third season did drop, I held out. It was a busy time at work, and I wanted to make the space to watch it; reverently, with more care than I take around my meditation practice. It was too important to rush. Like Nick and Charlie, I waited a long time before I went all the way.

Rewind

When I’ve watched the last episode, after I close the laptop or put away the DVDs (I have all seasons of The US Office, 1-9), I’m know they’re only on pause. They all wait for me, along with the others I keep in my psyche: Lloyd Dobler holding his boombox in Say Anything, Bender putting on Claire’s earring in The Breakfast Club. They’re in the books I keep on my shelf to re-read: Evie and Rourke in Anthropology of an American Girl, William and Sarah in The Hottest State, even Dylan and Joc in Hello, Groin.

Sometimes I yearn to be somewhere else: not in this house, with this husband, with this settled life. In this version, I didn’t stay single. I don’t tumble into new relationships, stumbling over toes while leaning in for a first kiss. I gave all that up long ago.

But I’ll always take the chance to go back to the beginning. When I read a story, when I watch a show…if they tell it right, I remember.

And then I don’t need to go anywhere at all.