Solitude is the Nurse of Love

It should go without saying that the belief is nonsense that there is only one person in the world for us.

We fall in love with those who are close by us, whom we know at work, whom we see in our local pub, who lives two streets away, or whom we deliberately seek proximity to by way of computer dating or Lonely Hearts columns.

We don’t have to spend decades trying to find the one woman or man for us, until we finally discover them half the world a way in a small town 90 miles north north-east of Novosibersk.

It isn’t sheer luck that our life-partner is usually somebody who lives near us. We fall in love with a girl we know at school, with a man we meet at university, with someone who happened to advertise for a date in the same paper that we read. We are formed to fall in love with those nearby, those who are available to us.

We fall in love largely from propinquity, from being close in location, and from little more. If we are lucky, we fall in love with someone who is a match for us in character and interests and achievements and background, but more often than not sheer propinquity is all the basis for so-called love.

In these cases “love” is no more than a passing phase that is propelled by loneliness, or lust, or the need to dominate, or even boredom. If there is no similarity of character, no shared interests, the relationship either disintegrates painfully, or - more sadly - carries on with the partners continuing to delude themselves that things will change, that their relationship will work out in the end.

These relationships don’t work out in the end, We all know people, long married, who do nothing but grouch about their wife or their husband, who could stop their own frustration simply by acknowledging their husband or wife was not a good match for them, and now that the kids are grown both parties would be happier if they separated.

But people rarely do this – because they are human and they are therefore afraid. It’s better to have someone to come home to, even when rubbing along with them is more a matter of friction than delight.

I am not faced with such a quandary. Women never desired me, and looking at myself and my history and what has become of me I don’t blame them.

My quandary is that being human myself, I fall in love too. And ironically, I don’t fall unrealistically in love. I love a woman who is a good friend to me, who is flawed, and who I see is flawed. I know who and what I am, and I usnderstand she cannot love me. I doubt any woman now will. But the only thing unrealistic in my love is I’m a ruined man with a ruined life who should never even presume to want a woman like her. That said, I am the ruin of a man who might have been a good match for her.

No matter, what is past is past.

But funnily enough, we have – or more honestly once had - a lot in common, unlike so many people who are in love. And I don’t look at her and think her a paragon. So many of the things she does I can see are rooted in her flaws and faults, I am content that she is human and so therefore flawed, and I know where many of her flaws and problems originate, so they endear her to me.

A friend said to me recently in regard of her “you’ve fallen for her like a soldier in a military hospital falls for his nurse” and I’m content to agree with him. She’s been a kind and supportive friend in a time of my need, when she didn’t have to be. Why not fall for someone with such an admirable quality? We can only fall in love with the people around us, not with strangers we have never met.

We have to fall in love with someone, it’s how we’re made, and it’s in the end all we’re here for. We are brought into the world by way of love, and by way of love we bring others into the world for their own momentary taste of being. If we are lucky that is, which I have not been - I will pass life on to no one.

Loving someone places no duty on them to love one back.

I’m sad she can’t love me, but I’m glad I love her, because she is good and it means I have deeply recognised and appreciated her goodness and have a little of it in my life.