Tag Archives: relationships

love and power on a Melbourne tram

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I was on the tram a week ago and a couple in their fifties sat opposite me, she better dressed and presented than he and both a tad flustered. My instinct tells me they are on their second marriage and it is ‘early days’. They appear to be seriously interested in each other and that’s nice. Let us call them Amy and Bill for no reason except for the fact they never used their names and I have to call them something. It occurs to me as I write that they used no endearments either and this is surprising. Perhaps they have been together for many moons?

Amy stops fiddling with her handbag and Bill squints at his phone in the way all us older folk do.

A conversation ensues on where they should leave the tram.

Amy. ‘Where do we get off?’

Bill. ‘Swanston Street.’ This is not a clever answer. It is a long street.

Amy. ‘But where?

Bill Googles. ‘Bourke Street.’

Amy. ‘Where did we get off Thursday?’

Bill. ‘Bourke.’

Amy. ‘Collins is better.’

Bill. ‘Okay.’

Amy looks out the window. ‘No, it’s fine.’

Bill. ‘Well, Collins then.’

Amy glances at me and looks out the tram window again. ‘That’s a nice building’.

It actually is not, however, it succeeds in throwing Bill off course.

Bill takes her hand, she lets him. ‘Where?’ He peers out.

Amy. ‘Bourke. It’s fine.’

Bill. ‘Collins is good.’

I am trying not to smile, this is like an amateur Pinter play where the silences and deviations mean more than the literal words.

Amy relents, looks at him, smiles. ‘Did you book?’

Bill. ‘No need.’

Amy. ‘It was busy Thursday night.’

Bill. ‘I’ll ring.’

Amy stiffens ever so slightly and looks out the window again. ‘It’s fine.’

I really want to applaud the way she’s playing him.

Bill. ‘You have a smudge here.’ He touches her face with love. A caress.

Amy rubs it off. ‘I’ve said to you before about that mirror.’

Ah, I think, so she was in his house last night and ‘wants a few changes’.

She glances at me again, I stay poker-faced and decide this will be great for my dialogue exercise with Writers Victoria in two weeks.

And so it goes. She is not being horrible and seems truly to like him and he adores her, though possibly is not up to the task.

Amy. ‘Which stop is it?

Bill. ‘After this one.’

Amy. ‘Here is good’.

She stands and he follows, she takes his hand and as they leave the tram, she looks back at me with the faintest of smiles and I allow myself a smile in return.

Bill was oblivious of my presence. For Amy, I was an audience and I understood that the little to and fro I witnessed had been for my benefit as much as an exchange between two lovers.
As I am ambled away at the next stop, I recalled my therapist saying years ago ‘David, all relationships are a struggle for power, at least in the beginning.’
BTW, Rosie the dog has been passed as ‘dog and child friendly’ and is up for adoption. She needs a more suitable home than we can give her, but she will be missed…

No, I do not want to be your ‘friend’

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Last week you sent me a ‘friend’ request on Facebook. Seriously? After five years?
We were lovers in your little apartment, sex and alcohol our rocket fuel. Perhaps we were in love a little for a time and then we weren’t and I flew home.
You sent me a ‘fuck you’ email six months later saying you were married; was that number 3 or 4? I forget.
I did not answer, there was nothing to say.
I moved on, as they say.
Now you want to ‘friend’ me? We were never ‘friends’; I loved you, not sure I ever liked you.
Click ‘decline’.

The dance of love in 100 words

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We see each other.
I step forward.
You step forward.
We circle each other.
I step forward.
You step forward.
We dance.
man and woman dancing
We move apart, watching each other, eyes locked as we circle the room.
We step to each other.
We dance the quadrille of love, the waltz of love and the tango of love.
We laugh and love, eyes for no other.
You step back.
I step forward.
You step back.
I step forward.
You stand still.
We watch each other.
I turn, you follow.
You stop. I turn back.
You turn away.
I leave.
The dance is over.
dance ended

a modern fairy story of infinite nothingness in 100 words

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She brought him back to life. Not the usual chest pumping, sternum cracking, lip-to-lip resuscitation, instead she was kind and caring to him as other women had not or perhaps before he had no ability or experience to recognise and accept it. He began to trust and to feel again; to come from the shadows he knew well into the light which was unfamiliar and frightening.
She loved him in her way and he mistook this, unaccustomed as he was to friendship and compassion. He fell in love with her and told her so.
This time she could not save him.
broken heart

The romantically unemployed and free market economics

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I read an article which used rational choice theory within economics to categorise those not in a relationship as being ‘romantically unemployed’. It referred specifically to the construction of the algorithms which underpin online dating sites and the matching of singletons to become couples.

Okay, at one level this is funny. Not ‘single’ or ‘looking’ or ‘not interested’ or’ perfectly happy with my dog, thank you’ or whatever, but unemployed. Romantically unemployed.
Dig a little deeper and it is unfunny. Unemployed equals ‘unproductive’ in free market thinking; that is, not contributing to society or the national economy. In the nasty jargon of the Australian government, these unemployed are ‘leaners, not lifters’ who sponge off the rest of society. imagesFGH768PA economics terms
The romantically unemployed? Do they need to apply like the labour market unemployed for a position/date forty times per month to avoid being pariahs on the economy? Should they be expected to travel far and wide searching for a date/position? Should they be doing productive local community work/dating locals in order not to be socially unacceptable?
At least they receive no government benefits for being romantically unemployed and will not live in constant fear of having benefits reduced or removed to ‘encourage’ them back into romantic entanglement.
Should they be interviewed by government officials every month to check that they are ‘genuine romantically unemployed’ and not simply leaners who have set their romantic standards too high to avoid the perils of the dating pool and the joys of coupledom? Being unrealistic and not genuine in their quest? Not prepared to accept ‘good enough’ or NQR?
What about the free market obsession with ‘efficiency dividends’, which simply means doing more with less? How could this be targeted at the slack ‘romantically unemployed’? Surely there is room for more efficient searching and dating?
Surely a free market can make revenue from the ‘romantically unemployed’? Oh, that’s right. That is what online dating is all about and we are back at square one.
I’m pondering how we can refine this ‘romantically unemployed’ category; the unemployable, the long term, the unskilled, those in need of skills upgrading and further training?
All very funny and all very sad. And guess what? Everything I have poked fun at here is already happening. Think of any absurdity these days and I guarantee it is out there somewhere.

When pebbles become avalanches and relationships end

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Friends of mine have just split up with no chance of reconciliation and I have conflicting emotions. Part of me is shocked that the ending came abruptly and with such finality and a smaller part of me says ‘that was always going to happen, I saw it coming’.
More accurately, I should say that I was surprised and then began to think about the no-longer-a-couple and understood that I had registered the signs, grown accustomed to them and assumed they would continue together neither truly happy nor miserable, fearful of being alone.
When did the process begin? At what point was the end of the relationship unavoidable and needing only one final pebble – an unkind word, a look, an impatient sigh or a miniscule act of bad faith – to trigger the landslide of recrimination and the decision from which there is no going back?
Those tiny pebbles of hurt or neglect, unconscious perhaps at first and later consciously, maybe deliberately hurtful, uncaring at least, which unearth other pebbles and soon there is a tumble, small and then bigger and finally an avalanche and then silence when the words are over and there is nothing left to be said.
Not always of course, not every day. Rather an accumulation of grit like an axle on a baggage-laden cart rolling along dusty roads day after day in good times and bad and it is not noticeable and anyway it does not matter or we believe it can be rectified ‘later’ [fateful, lazy word] when we have more time or are under less pressure or the kids are grown up or a myriad of other reasons until later is replaced by ‘too late’.
Looking back we puzzle when the pebble became an avalanche and we let it happen.
And yet –
And yet. Is the feeling of the inevitability of the end itself merely an excuse for our self-absorption in the trivia of the narcissistic culture in which we live, a world obsessed with individual rights [happiness, freedom, success, self-expression].