Addicted to romance? Addicted to sex?
If ranting will help me resolve my attempt to label myself, I am giving up ten minutes of my day to it, so I can with a free mind, produce work today that will satiate the Crone/Diva of Chennai Theatre. It will stop her from giving my two mentors a hard time for picking me to write for her.
It could be that there is no dichotomy between the two, and that it is the same pheromone in different garb. Which confuses my essentially monogamous heart. It is a heart that cannot say those three under-rated words "I love you" to more than one person in the same week. It's a heart that has gotten over its reluctance to reveal it to more than one man in a year.
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He turns up this month in your country for a holiday, the first man who told you he loves you after you lowered your expectations of marital romance.
Four years ago, you absorbed that ray of romance like a welcoming sponge. You luminously reciprocated as you usually do to 'safe' men, and had a 'safe' long-distance emotional relationship, with powerful fantasies keeping it warmed up every breathing moment. The only time you touch is in a viewing chamber for transit travellers at a foreign airport, where you find a miniscule gap between the viewing glass and the table on which it is set up, and you touch the tip of a finger to his.
Two years later, he arrives in your city and he refuses to meet you at a restaurant because his relatives crawl all over the city, and you refuse to meet in his hotel room.
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Stalemated and broken-hearted, you fall in love with the next man who says he loves you.
He says that to you when you appeal to him to take away the book he has lent your husband. It is a book that purports to reveal the truth about religion/s. There is a picture of a long-haired saffron robed-guru on the cover and it creeps out you and your children because their father reads it every night for six months without finishing it; because you are threatened, isolated and disciplined like the home is a monastery, even before you recover from the shock of moving to a ramshackle country without friends.
He cannot do anything about the book as it is his older brother who has lent his classmate, your husband, the book. Instead, he teaches you to stand up for yourself and your daughter and tells you he is in love with you.
On the rebound, you lose your marital virginity.
But then you fall physically sick at the radical step you think you have taken. He is nowhere near to hold and calm you down, and you surprise him with your guilt trip. He takes time out and gives you space to recover. You hold on to his memory but you are too guilt-stricken to go for it again. He continues to profess love; he is there for you when you need an ear, but painfully you forget and forget till you never fantasize about him. You explain you can't want him again but he is gentle about that and tells you that love cannot forget, and is not desperate, but patient and fulfilled. He rationalizes the necessity to be apart for the sake of his relationship with your husband.
You are glad he has a fulfilled life elsewhere, but you don't find that yourself. You throw yourself in with single girlfriends because you are no longer on the wavelength of married friends. These new friends seem to have trouble finding men to be in love with and that worries you. Are you giving out whorish vibes, you wonder, that the number of men who fall in love with you quickly multiply? Have they a sixth sense that you have opened the door, and might open it for them too?
You stop telling your girls, and open up your doubts to your former lover in Sydney, for you have reconciled as friends. He reassures you and you try to stop the panic, the result of guilt enforced from your girlhood.
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One girlfriend introduces you to someone who courts you without romance for a few months. He calls you everyday for a year, recounting his days that begin with golf, his work with brandies, his weekends that he spends fishing and on a search for fresh seafood in quirky markets. Without pressure, he becomes your friend, and you are his, and soon he becomes the best sexual partner you have ever had, listening to your tears and your joys without rancour.
Not one word that denotes love passes between you. He is your own suave Christian Grey from Fifty Shades of Grey, but without the violence. Or the love. For the first time in your life, you realize you have given up on romance. The expectation seems wiped clean from your life. You work hard, you are kind to others, you try not to miss friends and family, and your golfer keeps your spark alive for that time in your future when you will be free to stand up for yourself without abandoning your children.
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While your golfer calls everyday, and the men who have loved and been loved fill other emotional gaps, you fall.
This time it is your responsibility to stay away, for he is but a boy who has barely begun the cycles of life while you are on your second run. You are stern with yourself, and push him out of your mind. He does not give up, and one day you find yourself turning like the sunflower to the sun. It is the same luminous reciprocation to 'safe' men, the emotional relationship that you are addicted to, powered by unlikely fantasies.
On a fateful train ride one day, it is shattered by a realization: he is a boy who will biologically and inevitably need girls. You are a woman who is legally with a man, and illegally with another, in love with none, but bound by word to both.
You pause.
You clean up your broken heart once more. You strengthen yourself and go again, toward love.
Sex and romance: there is no dichotomy when you are with the right person. The question if they are different arises when you are with the wrong person.
You give yourself to him now, and focus on the romance.
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The holidaying man asks if you will see him this month. You talk of how complex sex and romance and distances are. You tell him how breaking your heart over him led to another on the rebound. You tell him how much you love to love and how you break your heart over it.
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You could be selfish and break-proof your heart by not giving in to romance; or you could be brave and give in and risk your heart again.
This year, you choose the latter, though the risk is a hundredfold.
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