Happiness.
What does it mean to be happy?
More specifically, how does one define happiness when it comes to relationships? Is it a feeling? A state of mind? A sense of security? How many people think they are happy, but are just afraid of admitting they are not? That they’ve settled for something for the sake of comfort, convenience, or even financial considerations? At what point does someone realize they’re not actually happy, and unplug themselves from the matrix – so to speak?
I’m a happy person – or so I thought I was. My significant other and I have just capped our second decade together and we have never, in all of that time, had anything even remotely resembling your typical Hollywood-style marital spat. We get along amazingly well and, to the outside world at least, are the model married couple. We joke with each other, have a million inside jokes, and can know what each other is thinking without ever saying a word.
But I also have that same type of connection with my sibling.
My sibling and I can joke with each other. My sibling and I have a million inside jokes. My sibling and I can share a sideways glance and know exactly what each other are thinking. Also, and much to the relief of common decency and society as a whole, my sibling and I are not intimate with each other.
And neither are my SO and I.
If I stop there, or even focus too much on that aspect, I risk sounding shallow. I risk sounding creepy. So allow me to attempt to explain why, for the benefit of my own happiness I am focusing on that to some extent.
I recently met someone. Go ahead, get it all out of your collective system, I am a terrible person for even looking at someone else while married. For what it is worth, however, I wasn’t planning on meeting this person. I wasn’t looking to meet anyone. And, in twenty-some odd years, I’ve never seriously considered even the possibility of there being anyone else in my life. But there it is, I met this person who was also in a long-term relationship with their SO. We shared an obvious interest in each other that night we met, and that night ended in some rather heavy but still very much PG-13 style make-out sessions in the back of an Uber.
Say it, we are terrible people who deserve to be caught and exposed for letting down our respective spouses and thinking only of ourselves.
But just what about ourselves? I’m not naïve. I understand that things like this can happen when inhibitions have been lowered via the ingestion of certain liquids, and that most of these occasions are followed by gut-wrenching guilt and shame. For me, however, when I saw that person’s name pop up on my phone the next day, just to say hi and thank me for the night before, my heart sang.
I felt more and more alive with each day that passed. I found myself thinking less about the feeling of their kiss, their embrace, and more of our subsequent conversations. I had an entire swarm of migrating monarchs, who had lost their way and wound up stuck within my stomach – and they would wake up and bounce off the walls whenever I would think of this person. I started feeling like I was in high school again, where I would listen to three or four songs constantly on repeat, because they made me think of this person.
I was skipping up the stairs at the train station, surrounded by thousands of sour-faced commuters, all because of the way this one person made me feel.
But I did also feel guilt. I did also feel shame.
Back at home I had the sweetest SO who, I still believe, loved me very much, just as I loved them. That love, however, had changed for the both of us. Long gone are the days where we would hold hands in public, or anywhere for that matter. Long gone are the days where anything more than a quick kiss on the lips felt forced or awkward. Long gone are the days where it felt like my SO actually wanted to be intimate with me, or that doing so was anything other than a chore or a favor – something for which I felt I should thank them on those rare occasions when it actually happened. We had become roommates.
That didn’t mean we disliked each other, far from it to be honest. We shared the same view on everything from politics to parenting. We were intellectually on the same level, we both loved to travel (and to the same places), and we shared many if the same interests. We agreed on pretty much everything – until I met this person and started taking a deeper look at what my SO and I really had.
What we had was a relationship based on the premise of not rocking the boat. If something came up that was too heavy to discuss, it wouldn’t be discussed. By way of example, we had a discussion, just months prior to our wedding, where I told them that I wasn’t really sure we were making the correct decision. This was met with tears and not much else from my SO, and within a day or two all was conveniently forgotten and we each pretended that the conversation ever happened.
That’s been the model for our relationship, ever since. If there is ever anything I feel that needs to be brought up, I have to weigh the chances of that conversation having any substantive effect on our relationship aside from making them cry. Almost always, the decision is made to just bottle those feelings up and soldier on. So for the past twenty years, this is how I’ve lived – inside my own head for the sake of the greater good.
A common theme for couples who split, so I’ve read, is that one or both spouses no longer feels appreciated – and I must admit it has been many, many years since I’ve known what that feels like. I am expected to do virtually everything around the house and for the family, in addition to being the primary breadwinner. I do all of the cooking, including weekdays when I work. I am the only one who cleans anything in the house aside from the laundry. I do the dishes, the kitchen, the toilets, bathrooms, vacuuming, the trash, the lawn, handle all of the finances, make everyone’s appointments, take care of the dog, plan all the vacations… you get the picture. If I have a work-from-home day, I spend most of it cleaning. During the summer, when my SO is home all week, I spend my weekends taking care of the lawn. Everything seems to fall on my shoulders – probably because it’s easier to just grin and bear it, than it is to say something and make my SO cry. Every now and then I will test the waters by mentioning it would be nice to have a little help with something – but the responses to those gentle nudges are such that I don’t dare bring up how I truly feel.
Compare that to the way I’ve felt since meeting this new person, and hopefully you can begin to understand why I am still entertaining the idea that a scandalous little fling could potentially be something so much more. Sure it’s been barely two weeks since I met this person, but those two weeks have been some of the most exciting, wondrous weeks of my life.
Every morning I wake up, looking forward to a text or message from them. I think about them constantly throughout the day. I break into a huge smile whenever a text comes through with their name attached. And I miss them when too many hours go by without hearing from them.
All of these feelings, despite the fact that it was only that one night, and even then there wasn’t all that much that went on between us. We had met up in person, a few days later, to talk through what had happened, and there was no physical contact whatsoever during that meeting. That meeting, however, did serve to reinforce the feelings we both had that, maybe just perhaps, this was more than just an alcohol-fueled hookup.
Why can’t I feel like this all the time? Why can’t the one I’m with make me feel, twenty years from now, the way they make me feel today? Why do we have to accept the notion that feelings change over time? Does enjoying this one life really mean that you have to chuck this feeling out the window, and convince yourself that those feelings never last anyway? If I can find a person who makes me feel now, like I felt when I was in high school, why can’t that feeling be permanent? And if it can be permanent, is this the person who can help me feel this way for the rest of my life?
Ultimately, is searching for my own happiness a good enough reason to risk what – until a few weeks ago – I had previously thought of as happiness? For that matter, is what I’m feeling now, happiness? It sure feels like it to me.
But it still scares the hell out of me, that all of this is for naught, and I’m just being selfish.