The weekend is finally coming to an end and I’m ready! It hasn’t exactly been and bad weekend, but it’s been a bit of a lonely one. My wife has been away on a trip we meant to take together, but because I have been feeling so cruddy she went without me. That meant four days at home, just the dog, the cat, and me.
I enjoyed the extended time spent with silence and solitude but my wife and I have been together and been so close for so long that when she is away, it really does feel like a part of myself, my psyche, my soul, had been ripped away.
There is a numbness, a blunting, a dampening that happens to my emotions and passions. It’s as if I go through a miniature grief and life becomes a little less lively, less livable until she returns.
She’s home now though, and the life is bright, full, and open again. All is right with the world and with me. What is interesting is that I don’t necessarily have to be talking or interacting with her to feel better. We don’t even have to be in the same room. I only need to know she is near me to feel whole.
I think about this a lot, this wholeness I feel with her. I think about how intertwined we are, how dependant we’ve grown, and I worry over how healthy or right it is to be this way.
I’m alternatively resistant to it and longing to deepen the bond and blur between who she is and who I am, where she ends and I begin. I know my resistance comes from fear about how we, or sometimes just I, will be perceived—too needy, too wanting, too willing to give up who I am. I don’t have many role models for long-term relationships, and even fewer for what constitutes healthy, so it’s hard to know or compare.
Perhaps, like all things in life, any example or comparison should be taken in the context of what feels right or wrong to you. Perhaps it isn’t about right or wrong at all. Perhaps it’s only about what is. After 18 years together, how could we not be so intertwined or dependant? How could the boundary between where she ends and where I begin not blur with time? This bond is inevitable.
Lisa Marie Blair 