Love does not hurt when you’re married

My Garmin tells me I’m really stressed at the moment. I didn’t need a Garmin to know that. On Thursday, my entire working day is meetings, continuously, from 9 am to 5 pm. I guess maybe my secretary might take pity on me and bring me some food. Or maybe some meetings will get cancelled. They’re mostly pointless anyway.

Our daughter has broken half her face and her arm (again) in an accident involving a cat and very good disc brakes, our eldest son is upset about his secondary school choice, our middle child is always emotional about the world and confused by his place in it. He loves canasta though, and when the world ends we can probably still draw our own cards on scrap to play it, so that’s good.

I feel as if all I do with my life is get up, cycle to the station in the dark, get on the 6.43 train to Euston, and cycle back home at about 8pm each day, in time to reheat whatever food someone might have made, watch an episode of something pointless and go to bed. Sometimes, I play my violin for a bit, and am confronted with the basic fact that time is skill. Not talent, just time. As my teachers says, “the more you play it, the more your fingers will find the right place by themselves”. Of course, they do no such thing, because I don’t play it enough, and when I do play it, my fingers reliably find the wrong place over and over again. I have a passable grasp of the Albinoni piece, but none of the others are remotely close to fluent, and I have just added a Beethoven violin sonata that is completely beyond me.

So in the usual selection bias of my blog posts (I write when I am unhappy), life feels very draining in general. One thing that is quite different to the past snapshots of this sort of vortex of stress and uncertainty is the way I remember all the many lyrics of popular songs of the 90s or the 2000s and what they meant to me.

One of my favourite songs of that era is What is Love by Haddaway. It is an adorably simple tune, ripe for endless remixes that keep it fresh.  Its lyrics can be remembered and sung by anyone in any state of inebriation:

What is love?
Baby, don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me no more

I still love listening to it, but the other day it was on my phone while I walked out of the station to unlock my bike from the sheds, and I realised that the lyrics have become quite meaningless to me. Why on earth would anybody who loves me hurt me? Why would love hurt? I used to love the Cher lyrics too, with her lovely deep voice;

Love hurts, love scars

Love wounds and mars

but really, I no longer identify with the emotional rollercoaster of love as it was before marriage.

It is in some ways strange, the state of marriage, like a cold marble slab which makes everything smooth. I can’t even quite recreate in my mind the endless uncertainty of every relationship that preceded it.

We are each other’s lives, we have grown up together, and there isn’t really any “weird person” moment, because I know all the weird bits already.  Of course we disagree sometimes, and we are not always perfectly fair to each other. But we don’t have little disagreements or resentments, because I suppose we know these are balanced out eventually. I make an effort with the things he finds annoying about me, and vice versa.

There are bigger disagreements that are more difficult, but I suppose I have nothing to compare those to, because no relationship other than marriage would have got as far as the big disagreements. It is an achievement to have something to negotiate which is entirely about someone’s overall view of the world. It is quite unlikely to ever be resolved, because if it was, one of us would be acquiescing, and would not be ourselves. Time will move on, the issue at hand will decrease in importance as we age and our circumstances change, and when the children have started out on their own lives, my view of parenting and his view of parenting will no longer matter. It will be what it will be, and we will never be able to disentangle nature from nurture anyway. Our children are all different people, and we have loved them all the same, with all our hearts. I suppose Cher may be right that when you love a child,

Love is like a cloud

And it holds a lot of rain

but that is not even necessarily going to be true, it’s just that being a parent is full of anxiety about the future, maybe forever.