a season of a particular length
on the nature of love and promises
My younger son Frank has a new favourite come-back. If I ask him for something, anything, no matter how basic, he looks at me witheringly then deadpans:
No promises.
Funny right? When an eight-year-old boy effects this kind of don’t-fence-me-in-toxic-bachelor-aloofness, it’s hilarious. This morning I found myself wondering, if he keeps saying it, will it still be funny when he’s sixteen? Or twenty-two? Or when he’s thirty-seven and I’m asking him whether he’s coming home for Christmas?
Less so, I suspect.
I once lived with a man who, when asked when he’d be home for dinner, always said, ‘Too soon to tell, isn’t it?’ then strolled out. At first it was funny. But once I realised he meant it, I stopped laughing.
It’s maddening when people are feckless and refuse to be accountable. At the same time, the older I get, the more wary I am about making or being subject to Big Promises. Literally about anything. In my experience, Big Promises are distinct from commitment and accountability, which are composed of small acts of devotion, a day to day thing. Big Promises are like Big Plans. You can make and obsess over them and many people do, but more often than not they unravel to dust often being supplanted by other Big Plans and Big Promises, which unravel in turn, and so on ad infinitum. We engage in these fantasies in an effort to create an illusion of safety and permanence. But nothing is permanent.
We will never know for sure what’s going to happen. We can only trust and hope and muddle along in the present moment. It’s one thing to know this consciously, but another thing entirely to believe it in our bodies. It has taken me nearly half a century to get here, but I am beginning to actually grasp it.
I have no idea what’s going to happen and I am okay with it.
These days, it’s like the weight of three decades of social conditioning has been lifted off me and replaced with a helium levity. I feel a great opening up of possibility just here: under my ribcage, an expansive feeling of acceptance and wonder. I have not found god or a guru or anything like that, I’ve just gone through some hard stuff in recent years and I’m beginning to learn from it. It’s astonishing how much we change and continue to change. I’m excited, for the first time in a long time.
What I’m interested in now is how I can earnestly endeavour to be accountable to the needs of my loved ones without precluding the possibility of change in myself, which is constant and inevitable.
Sometimes, of course, it’s appropriate and necessary to make and follow through on a Big Promise. If a clock is ticking, the more vertiginous and fraught the moral binary. For instance, if someone you love is dying and asks you for a kidney, you should probably give them a definitive answer quickly. But more often we project big emotional stakes onto small issues, creating unnecessary conflict and power struggle, damaging our relationships in the process.
Romantic comedy and fiction is full of trumped up versions of this scenario. People vacillate and vacillate until suddenly they… realise what is they actually want! Now they’re running through the airport! Will they get there before the plane takes off and they lose the love of their life forever?
Real life isn’t like that. Nobody runs through airports anymore, if they ever did. In real life, ‘no promises,’ is an honest, if unsatisfying, answer to almost every Big Future question we come up against. In real life there is only the present moment and we reveal our true desires through an ongoing series of tiny decisions made minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month and so on. Why make promises when the right thing to do will reveal itself?
Also: making clear decisions about the future in the present is almost impossible, because by the time we get there, we’ll be a different person with a different world view. When we are confronted with decisions like ‘Should I have this baby or buy this house or give my dying brother my kidney?’ The question shouldn’t be, Will this make me happy? But rather, Am I excited and curious to meet the Future-Me who results from this?
‘No promises,’ makes room for the fact that our feelings and minds are constantly in a state of flux. This is uncomfortable to think about but we should think about it. The less time we spend anxiously trying to shore up our false sense of security in relationships, the better. There is beauty and pleasure to be had in the not-knowing-ness. In the uncertain and ephemeral. I promise you.
In a recent post on marriage and monogamy, Miranda July set out her revised-midlife post-divorce view on love and commitment:
“Romantic relationships,” she writes, “are usually not supposed to be lifelong, but rather a season of a particular length, to be determined. People default to ‘lifelong’ in part because it can be really hard to trust your gut about the length of the season. Some relationships only last a few weeks (or a night) but you spend the rest of your life using things you learned from them. No length is better or more profound than any other length. But knowing the right length is profound, letting relationships change and perhaps even come back as friendships, is very meaningful. My very best man-friend was once my worst boyfriend.’
A season of a particular length is a beautiful, I think. A romantic and optimistic way of saying ‘no promises.’
The fact is, most of us go through our waking lives feeling a mixture of emotions about everything. This ambivalence extends to include even the people and things we are most committed to. In the course of any given day, I love my sons so badly I would happily die for them AND I am also convinced I will die if I don’t find a way to get away from them. Am I committed to them? Of course.
Ambivalence is not antithetical to enduring love and commitment, it is literally baked into the equation. The struggle, I suppose, lies in figuring out how to live with it, by which I mean learning how to balance out our own needs while endeavouring to meet the needs of our loved ones. In the meantime, enjoy the season while it lasts. Spring is just around the corner.
Oh, this post resonates with me.
This part in particular stuck out: how I can earnestly endeavour to be accountable to the needs of my loved ones without precluding the possibility of change in myself, which is constant and inevitable
Thank you as always, Leah!
The thing which really taught me this lesson was a breast cancer diagnosis. It came out of the blue, in mid January 2022, just as we were hoping to get back to the kind of life we’d had before lockdown, full of plans and trips and adventures. Suddenly, all bets were off, and in fact the entire year was focussed on treatment, ultimately successful, so far.
I realised then how much is contingent. Just because you used to be able to climb a mountain doesn’t mean sheer willpower will get you back to that level of fitness after serious health issues. I really am just glad to be alive, to have more days and more options and more experiences ahead of me. My husband has found this quite difficult. He keeps asking when normal service will resume. When we’ll have challenges and goals again. But I hold everything except relationships much more lightly now. I have a little grand-daughter growing up in another country. That matters more to me than exotic trips these days. I’m happy not having much in the way of long-term goals, and I’m only gradually realising how much our culture resists this state of mind.