I’ve been dating Rebekah for about four months now, and I’m surprised at how good it is. Sure, a relationship can be hard work—or, more accurately, a lot of work. It’s not onerous like moving a piano up three flights of stairs would be; it’s just hard to continue to be thoughtful and kind and loving, to continue to build the relationship even as it starts to feel old hat. The difficulty is in doing the little things.
But if done correctly, you never even get close to ‘old hat.’ Instead, you end up being overwhelmed by Romance, which is awfully distracting, but only because it’s so much fun.
My point isn’t the work, though—it’s how good it is. For whatever reason—be it evolutionary wiring, fallen nature, the influence of literature and Hollywood—guys tend to get this fantasy of having many girls over the course of their lifetime. If one is good, then many are better. If it’s fun having a wife, then adding a few ladies on the side only makes things better.
We know, of course, that this isn’t really true, because it destroys relationships, families, and soils everyone involved. But there’s still a fantasy that says, “But if we could somehow remove the consequences, it would certainly be a thing worth doing.” It’s like the magical hangover pills. At last, we can really enjoy ourselves.
I’m realizing, though, that this James Bond, ladies’ man fantasy is even more of a lie than I initially realized. Besides being way more sordid and slimy than it appears in the movies, it also can’t possibly be so carelessly suave. Bond is very smooth; good for him. But most of us aren’t. In fact, no real person can pull off that brand of smooth. Even the the most charming can be embarrassingly awkward when doing something for the first time.
The first time I kissed Rebekah was great, but a little awkward. In the meantime, we’ve gotten much better at it—so much so that looking back at our first few tries, I have a strange mix of emotions—I feel a little embarrassed, because we certainly were awkward, but I also feel like that those were some of our most precious moments. The excitement of a first, the thrill of the new, and the promise of more to come. My head was spinning at the time, I can assure you; even thinking about it now makes my heart glow.
But so much of the thrill of a first kiss is the looking forward, being able to look forward to building something with that person. A first kiss is an initiation– “This thing is for real, this is romance, and there is much more to come.” I loved those first kisses, but I am still glad that our technique has dramatically improved.
Which brings me (finally) to my point—there’s a thing that happens in building a relationship with someone that just gets better and better as time goes by. It’s just like we’re learning to dance, and at first we’ve never danced at all—or even if we have, it was with another partner, and in this sort of dance every step is freestyle. If you don’t know where your partner is going next, you’ll be tripping all night. But the only way to learn the dance well is to spend time dancing with your partner.
How sad, that someone who can never commit gets barely even a glimpse of the dance that the happily married enjoy. I use kissing as an example because I think it (along with the whole love-making genre) is the easiest place to see what I’m talking about. But it’s less about the physical than it is about learning to go shopping together, or to clean the hosue together, or to visit family together. That’s where the dance really becomes technical, and where it really becomes romance. The dance happens most where real life is lived. How awful to be constantly confused, perpetually lost, trying in vain to pick up your partners cues.
But on the other hand, how beautiful to be the sort of team where one knows how to respond before the other has even begun to move.
