Incomparable

A girl I know fell in love with the first boy she kissed. She told me all about it, in a darkened bar a few days ago.
She was innocent, and ignited; ravenous and heartbroken.

She said she had asked him for that ‘friends with benefits’ mode of relating. And of course, she felt more. Because you cannot limit how you feel, once that subtle key is turned, and the strength and power of female sexuality are unlocked, in response to the energy of the other.
After the first encounter, he broke it off. Because she wanted more than he had offered, and what they had agreed to.
She had had no negotiating position, from the start. She did not give herself the right to have one.

What is interesting to me is that she now has the opportunity to explore that feeling, in herself. All the gorgeousness of it. Detached, in a way, from the object of it. The man with the closed heart, who is only unavailable to her, but who can apparently be fully himself with other people. It’s like investing in a risky bet on the stock exchange. High profits, great losses. Watching it rise and
fall, every day. Is he opening up a little more? Can she see it, at last? Is it for real?

And there is a specific intensity in loving a person who does not feel the same way, or does not feel anything for you. All your messages get returned to sender. Your yearning is not returned: not shared, but mirrored. Your desire is reflected back by the flat silver surface of his self-declared non-responsiveness.

The great gift here is the knowledge of self that you can gain. How much you yourself want to give. How fiercely you can feel. How alive, how electric, your life is when that hidden, hooded energy sparks up at last, and you decide to open the gears and let it flow.
Lovers like that are like crash test dummies, on which we can practise, I want to say to her. They feel nothing, so you can safely use them to simulate the real thing, and find out what you want, and how to behave in that specific, universalized dance of longing and lust which is the game of love.

But take that knowledge, when the good starts to become outweighed, and leave this empty space. Don’t fill the manifest gap between you with your own desire. Don’t let it spiral you. Or if you do, line the walls of your bedroom with sound-proofed lining. Make your bed with the softest sheets before you lie down in it. And appreciate your own tears, and listen to your own screams at the terror of abandonment, and comfort yourself in the darkness of the absence of what you think could most console you.

His arms — not so much better than anyone else’s, in fact. Less strong, less muscled, less generously offered. But she had hoped his heart would open to her, once he saw how much she really cared for him, and understood him. And she asked him to hug her. She had to ask.

And now the passion in the sexts she will keep on her phone for a while will slowly evaporate, like smoke, like dust in the clearing air.
What makes a lover incomparable? Can we be objective enough to love them for their intrinsic qualities, even if we are not positioned by them as special? Are we strong enough not to define our worth by the level of their appreciation of us?
The remedy is love, but not of the romantic kind, with its unique specificity and its implicit, etheric monogamy. Love for life itself, and the energy within us which inspires us to react, respond, and wish to connect. To get involved, in the intricate webbing which connects us human beings to each other.
But I cannot say this to the girl. She is channelling her experience of the divine through her one-week
relationship with him. With its sexting and its tentative, bittersweet taste of unfulfillment. The lure of the pain and anguish to come. The intoxicating tilt. The imbalance, the fracture at the core.

I advise her to say to such a lover:
The next move is yours.
But I am not going to move. I am going to stay here, and feel it all.
My feelings are mine to feel. They are part of the person I am, this body and this heart and mind and spirit.
She opened up in a fraction of the space she found she could inhabit. And that fraction was what she allowed herself.
But there is a bigger world than the world prescribed by that connection. She just needs to step out of the boundaries she had agreed to. That limited space. That demarcated safety zone. Above the waist, and so on.
And proceed.

The next level needs to be gone to in herself.
Come hither, then, and see her in the bliss she deserves to feel.
All the real feelings, with someone real.