I can buy myself flowers, not life

I think being an identical twin is a good thing. Many identical twins seem to make it their whole identity, whereas we go perhaps the other way and never mention it to people who have only met one of us. It seems a weird thing to randomly announce, after all. “What film shall we go see? By the way, I’ve got a twin”. This leads to some awkward encounters, with a surprisingly varying range of reactions. I would say 60% of people who first meet “the other one” seem unfazed, and usually just say something sarcastic like “when were you going to mention you had a spare?”.

The other 40% of reactions are much more varied, ranging from lewd comments to full-on terror. When I went to visit my sister in Siena, a casual acquaintance saw us both in the street, crossed himself, looked at the sky and ran away.

We look very similar, we have quite similar views on many topics, although I would argue many siblings do.  We have almost the same cultural tastes. I probably like more classical music than she does, mainly because I play it, and she likes more art house cinema and classics, whereas I’m quite happy with any old zombie slop. We both love running, although she is an insane Ultramarathon runner and I’m more of a parkrun person.

So I always feel a bit wrong-footed by larger differences; passions I don’t share, and different opinions about people. Also, iPhones. I don’t see the point of spending 5x the money for virtually the same thing, minus dev tools, whereas she has now adopted her work iPhone wholesale. I keep mine switched off most of the time.

We were sitting in the car, and she commandeered the Bluetooth. We both like Miley Cyrus well enough; she has a nice voice and seems quite interesting. She can even act. She’s not on the level of interesting to me that maybe Radiohead or Pulp is, but she’s a good compromise if the alternative is Taylor Swift. I’m one of those people who doesn’t listen to lyrics much. I get the chorus, then I’m just listening to the melody and don’t really care about the words. Enter Sandman came on the playlist the other day and I was just turning up the volume and being transported back to my youth. So when my sister said Flowers was her favourite song, I thought she meant the catchy beats, and didn’t really think about it, until she started explaining that the lyrics were an intellectual epiphany for her (she didn’t actually say “intellectual epiphany”, I just like the phrase, ever since someone asked me when mine would arrive).

I was shocked. Some variety of my children were probably in the back of the car. The idea that I would be happier alone than with my husband seems completely alien to me. I don’t even remember a time when I was without him, and I can’t quite imagine my life without the warm embrace of someone who wants to know how my day went, who tells me I’m amazing all the time, who just wants to be with me.

Every line of the lyrics makes me sad, because it is not true.

I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours, yeah
Say things you don’t understand
I can take myself dancing, yeah
I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can

I’ve instructed every boyfriend I’ve ever had not to buy me flowers, because it’s an annoying waste of money, but every other line of that is not really why anyone is married anyway. Of course you have to love yourself to be happy in a relationship, but being alone is not preferable to being in the right relationship. We don’t go dancing any more, but I remember the first time we did, when we were work colleagues. We were both pretending we weren’t attracted to each other, but the energy of the moment and the snapshot in my mind of him in front of me, in his black tie as far as I remember, is something I think of often. We walked down the road to some pub near Caledonian Road when he first held my hand, when I was so anxious about everything. He makes me feel like it will all be ok, he will always keep me safe. I feel guilty that I often feel like I don’t do enough for him.

Maybe it’s anathema to me because the song acts like you should either have the perfect, self-fulfilling relationship, or you should have none. But the longer a marriage lasts, the less perfect it is, and the more it teaches you about acceptance and priorities – not every little thing matters, not everything is madly interesting, maybe I’m not perfect. More than anything else, children bind marriages and change the entire nature of the partnership. The partnership has to exist and be true first, but giving them everything we have matters so much more than we do, and I find it satisfying to step away from myself. We pass the baton on, and get to find new fulfilment in age, albeit Richard seems to find the prospect of senescence more daunting than I do.

This year, we are taking the kids with us for our wedding anniversary lunch, which they’re very excited about. It’s not going to be a thing every year, but this year it’s a Sunday, so it seems the easiest way of organising it. I am slightly worried that I am breaking the order of play, because I discussed with Richard early on that our bonds are easier to break, and therefore more important to nurture, than the bonds between us and our children. I have seen that come between people so often, where they misinterpret the natural priority of children to mean that the relationship must be subordinate and can be put on hold while the children are young. It cannot. Think about what happens when you pile 100 new features into your code branch and leave it to sit there “because our test suite is robust”. It is never as robust as you think; little undocumented glitches accumulate. A marriage is full of little glitches. You need to nurture it. When you try to merge it back as the children grow up, it doesn’t work any more. Pay attention to the branch, at all times. It’s the future, and it’s what sustains you.

I saw this quote from Charles Bukowski under a tiktok post of some childfree person bragging about how much money they have:

And when nobody wakes you up in the morning,

and when nobody waits for you at night,

and when you can do whatever you want.

What do you call it, Freedom or Loneliness