The Heart Is the Matter

“How can you be a Socialist and not like people?”

Her question was jarring in its simplicity. Why, indeed, was he so concerned with the plight of his fellow man?

The question was too big, too vast for him this bright, sunny spring morning, when just walking around the park hand in hand seemed to negate any such deep considerations.

“I don’t not like people, I like you don’t I?” That this should be a question at all seemed to her to go right to the heart of the matter.

“I know you love me, but I’m not always sure that you like me”

He snorted in gentle dismissive derision, but he feared that she was about to go on.

“I mean, I do get on your nerves don’t I? I feel your impatience with me”

O dear! Funny how we fall in love, he thought, so urgent, so dramatic, so needful, and then spent the next months and years picking away at one another. The impossible plateau of mutual-worship, giving way to the drip-drip erosion towards the beige chasms of ordinary life.

He was good at the first part and piss-poor at the second. In fact, he pondered way too often these days that, in order for him to accrue any hero status at all in a relationship, the other party had to be suffering in some way; family problems, depression, a crisis of some sort, because as soon as things straightened out his purpose in the partnership seemed to diminish, at least within himself. Yes, he needed to be a hero, a rock, an ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ figure. His ego demanded it. 

The other stuff – buying houses, acquiring cars, promotions, invites to dinner parties – he seemed to rail against to the point of obliteration and self-destruction, with little sense of rationale or compromise.

A child trying to have a relationship with a grown-up, but sometimes the grown-up became a child and he, the child, became the grown-up.

“You don’t get on my nerves. I love you very much”

How does one insecure person convince another insecure person of that?

“Anyway, I’m no longer a Socialist. You’ve turned me into a Liberal Democrat”

Maybe now, the walk among the pleasing flowers could continue unhindered by any more home truths.