How Can We Be Better Lovers?
We each have a handful of those moments, the ones we only take out to treasure rarely, like old photographs, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m… happy.” This kind of intense and present happiness is heartbreakingly ephemeral. As soon as we notice it, it is gone. It is no longer there. The feeling vanishes. Any attempts to contrive this feeling through any kind of replicable method, even if it is listening to the same old songs that reliably send shivers down our spine, can never quite recapture the spontaneous sentimentality. It is that first date, or even the first couple of dates, that our senses are so integrated to the extent we are completely immersed in the immediate.
We are so absorbed that the mindless chatter of our brain shuts up for once, and we temporarily lose ourselves.
Look at ourselves now. We might be doing the same things as we did before — clinking glasses, slurping oysters and possibly shameless making out in the public. But it doesn’t quite feel the same. It doesn’t feel as intense as the first time round. Sure enough, there is a whole universe of stories to be told from inside of lasting relationships and marriages. But that universe seems a little lacking now. We understand how oblivious we can be to our own happiness from holding of hands on the sidewalk to lazing in the park on a Saturday afternoon. A glib armchair analyst would conclude that we have our unique mix of camaraderie, affection and arguments. However, it seems as though our brain has lost its chemical capacity.
We secretly start to fear that it had been drained of dopamine by age or depression.
Let me propose — If I may — not to you (ha!), but to do something scandalous. Let’s go to a place that neither of us frequented, pretend to be strangers, and I would try to talk to you. Again. I wish there are generally recognised stages of love, like there are for cancer, so that we can gently break it to someone without causing a panic. “Listen, I really love you, but it is only Stage 1 — still very treatable.” Maybe we are at a stage of our relationship that we are awfully comfortable with each other that we no longer put up a first-date front and we are unknowingly becoming boring together. Yes, it feels free not needing to worry that you will realise a whole lot of truth about me. About us. But that is a hazard of relationships too. We start to take each other for granted and quit trying to impress. We forget how to flirt. We forget how to be attractive.
Maybe, just maybe, one day it emerges that one of us has a whole secret life: an affair or an ex of some unexpected type.
In our pretend first encounter, we are not going to act like we have a totally different personality. We are simply going to be ourselves in a parallel reality in which we haven’t met. We will be nervous. We will freak out over what to wear. I will probably have cold feet choosing which bar stool to sit at with possibilities and drawbacks as an opening chess move. With the added pressure that there are plenty of smart, well-read people vying, with their formidable educations and charm, for you, I may very well walk back home with my hands in my pocket, rather than intertwined with yours. Perhaps after this night, we will grow to understand that, despite the illusion of familiarity our time together may have fostered, we are still strange to each other. Perhaps after this night, we will learn to win each other again. And again. And again.
