Confessions of an eternal romantic

Presents 'Confessions of an Eternal Romantic,' by Michael Ventura.

By Michael Ventura, published on March 01, 1997

Well, then they broke up. Of course, many people don't--break up, I mean. They grow up, or accomodate, or whatever it is. The comforts of intimacy, or the needs of the children, or sometimes just the (usually unadmitted) fear of being alone, make for the gracious and/or resentful compromises of which long-term relationships are made. Most admit that the sexual juices then tend to flow quieter, and not as deeply, but that's often judged an acceptable trade-off-maturity, as it were. To rebel against the constrictions of maturity is to be branded a romantic. But is a romantic immature, or just someone who insists on feeling completely alive? No one will ever settle such questions. Suffice it to say that a romantic (me) is here speaking of at least two other romantics, and, yes, they broke up.

At 81, Papa is heartbroken. Until recently it was all he could talk about. But still I envy him. Even my down-to-earth brother Vinnie envies him a little. "Life just never stops, does it?" is how Vinnie put it. I would say that love, and life itself, are not a gift but a dare. If love's about anything, it's about daring the uncertainties. Love, that mysterious and overpowering sensation, visited our father unexpectedly, like a biblical angel, rather than those cherubs on calendars. It was beautiful and frightening by turns. (As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Every angel is terrible.") Love's angel gave Papa life, and hope, and the whiff of eternity. And then it gave him despair. And each of these gifts, even despair, was a door into his deeper nature. And isn't that, finally, what love is all about? Opening the locked doors within us?

It's dizzying. We don't call it falling in love for nothing. ("To my own personal earthquake," a woman once inscribed in a book she gave me.) We feel a great rush of wind, as though all the locked doors and windows within have been thrown open, and body and spirit can finally breathe again. Blockages inside us--hang-ups, inhibitions, and bad memories--shift, bubble, start to dissolve. It sometimes seems that a different set of blockages dissolves with each person we love (as though that's why we love them). But something else is moving too, set free by love, and some of it is a surprise, unwelcome, unsteadying, issues we thought resolved long ago--our attraction and/or repulsion to a mother or father, an unsuspected sexual bent that frightens even more than it excites. We're not in control of what rises from so deep within us. An inspired friend defined it this way: "Love is that which calls up all that is not-love to be healed." Thus every deep love is an immense venture of the soul. We feel more inner movement than we bargained for, both in ourselves and in our loved one.

writes checks on all our resources. Who can hope for security in the throes of an emotion that throws so much into question? Security is a sense of staying put, but love is always in motion. Security is a sense that something has finally been settled, but even parting doesn't settle anything between lovers, for then they must deal with each other in that hall of mirrors we call memory. You can leave a lover, but you can't leave an ex; the ex-ness of them is always with you, changing its meaning as you grow older. So how can we speak of anything being settled or secure between us?

We know what we feel today, but who knows what they're going to feel a moment or a year from now? We can promise to want to love someone for the rest of our lives, but we can't control falling out of love any more than we can control falling into love. We're all aware of this terrible uncertainty, whether or not we admit it, so our promises are no more than good intentions, and (as promises) they ring hollow.

The impulse toward security and the impulse toward passion seem completely at odds. And yet most of us want to be blasted by passion and cocooned in stability--in one and the same relationship, and we feel personally cheated when we can't have both.

That seems to be what people are really complaining about when they gripe about love. I know people who've been securely and more-or-less happily married for years, who, when their guard drops, admit that they resent the lack of passion in their lives. For the unhappiest among them, marriage has become a long series of negotiations of various, deep resentments. And I know people (like myself) who've gone from passion to passion, and are hitting middle age fearful and almost in despair, because they can hardly believe anymore that they'll ever find security in a relationship. The impossible trade-off between passion and security has led to a bitter resignation in many that isn't pretty to look at. Yet when are we ever reconciled to it?