My Husband Is Not My Friend

I love my husband. He is my favourite person in the whole world, if it were anything less than that I wouldn't have ever committed to spending my entire life with him, but I will never play video games with him. 

Let me explain. 

There are many types of couples, and my standard textbook belief is that different things work for different people and how you govern your relationship has a lot to do with what you want out of it. However I notice a tendency in long-term couples, they have shared interests and they do things together. For instance, I know a couple who bonded over their mutual love of football when they first met, and watching football together is the activity they love doing the most. It sounds sweet and they seem happy so I guess it works but it terrifies me. I don't want joint interests with my partner. I want him to be the interest I engage in with him and vice versa. I don't want to participate in his interests, I don't want him to participate in mine, I want to hear about them from him, reflected through the essence of how they make him feel. I don't, at all, want to play video games with him. 

My husband and I are extremely different people, and I don't just mean that we have different personalities, we also have different interests, hobbies, friends, tastes, lifestyles and radically different professions. I don't want to be part of his *entire* life, and I don't need him to be part of mine. I just want us to have a part of life that is ours. I don't want us to be an amalgam and I think that happens to a certain extent with long-term couples, you invite one and you expect both. They always vacation together. They "we" everything they say. Everything in their lives is a group activity and asking for "space" becomes a necessity that then indicates something is "wrong" with the relationship. I cannot stand the idea of losing my individuality to a relationship, a relationship is never ever going to be my identity, only a descriptor of who I love. I cannot stand the idea of someone losing their individuality to me either. I don't ever want to be in a relationship where someone feels the need to never change, because I am used to who they are now. So I like to say we are two individuals in love, and not that we are a couple, because it means more to me. It doesn't coalesce our identities into one. 

I realised recently that I have rather rigid boundaries when it comes to the nature of relationships, and my lovers are not my friends. My friends are very important to me, and my lovers are very important to me, but they are fundamentally different relationships. My husband is not my friend. I don't want to go get my nails done with him, I don't want to bake brownies with him, I don't want to take a Pilates class with him, I don't want to go to a comedy club with him, and I don't want camaraderie from him. I don't want to be his bro. That's what I do with my friends. I realise that when I put it like that this seems a little extreme, I won't go out of my way to keep it this separate, he can befriend my friends and we can all go to a show together, but essentially, he is still going as my lover, and never my friend. If he forms a relationship with my friend, that's their relationship, and doesn't need me in it. That's the rigidity I realise I possess. I've always found the idea of "marrying your best friend" very irritating, but I couldn't fully articulate why. 

I realised why a few days ago as my husband was beating me, and he threw me against a wall, and hit me in the mouth. My lip started to tremble and tears simultaneously started to fall out of my eyes, and I was madly, wildly overcome with the need to show him, with my body, that I wanted to crawl under his feet that I tried to climb into the one milimeter of space between the sole of his shoe and the floor. No, I really believed I could get in there, and I really tried to do it, and there was sincerity, and madness to the attempt, and he understood, and he said things to me I can never ever repeat, and every single emotion that comes off in that story, I felt it in my soul. That. That intimacy is why we aren't friends. We are, that. That is a very deep place, and I don't want to play video games with the person who can take me there. Not when we can go there and play instead. Our playground is different. That intimacy is at the heart of the relationship, and that isn't friendship. It's emotional luxury. 

Love is a vital decadence to me. That's how I view us, and our relationship. We are married sure but that's not what our relationship is. Our relationship is that I love him, and he loves me. We are in love. Fundamentally, to me, love is the thing that adds madness and decadence to life. It's not meant to be built on compromise nor on strife. It's not hard. As far as I am concerned, there are no secrets to marriage. You are either in love or you are not. You could have a relationship where love is not the priority, maybe togetherness is the priority, or companionship is, or the children, and maybe that is entirely gratifying to you, and my over the top saga seems unnecessary and childish to you, and that is perfectly fine. We are not all the same. I don't know what people want, I know what I want (and he wants), and I really know what I want from love. We are together because we love the same way. 

Love is art to me. The person I love can do or be whatever they want, but when we have time together, I don't want ever to need to while away time or find activities to do together, when we are together, I want to do us. I want to talk and make love. I want to light candles. I want to celebrate violence. I want to go madly into the abyss of us and find all the wrong, truthful answers. I want to communicate. I want to tell them things, I want them to tell me things. I want to show them exactly how I feel and I want to see their deepest, most emotional selves. I want to devote myself to them and find pain and joy. I want to write a million love letters and leave them all over the world for them to find. If love is the poetry of life, I want to live that. 

That may sound excessive, and I don't know, maybe it is. It doesn't mean we can't spend the evening beside each other just in our own worlds, we can and should, that's why I think we should have our own worlds. It doesn't mean there aren't other facets to our relationship, we are also parents together, and we have social and legal responsibility together, but the relationship of being lovers is primary, without that there wouldn't be anything else. If looking at him didn't stop my breath, there wouldn't be anything else. If his touch didn't make my heart skip a beat, we wouldn't be. If we didn't love, we couldn't be anything else. I don't even believe that partners should know everything about each other, I don't even know everything about myself, and lately i've been meeting people I knew when I was younger, and I can't even remember which ones I slept with, so no, I cannot give everything I have to my husband, because I don't even have all of it anymore. Then there are also parts of me that cannot be shared, and I don't think they will ever be shared. They are not secrets, they are facets of who I am. For instance, as an artist, as a writer, I cannot share myself. That is a very big part of who I am, and what goes on inside me, but it will always be a private part of me, and I cannot share it. It's an affair I am having with the world, but it takes place on the inside, and it cannot be seen by anyone else. I am sure there are parts of him I will never know. That is not what I want from love anyway. Knowing him best, and inside out is not what want, not the way I know my friends. 

And I acknowledge, maybe it is too much or too restrictive or too rigid a boundary to draw, but the thing is that I am not looking for something that "works", I will not, in love, settle for anything that doesn't blow my mind and soul every single day. I will not settle for a situation where most of the love and intimacy are in memory, and the memory is what sustains us, and keeps us going because of what once was. I will not give my life to a relationship that is built on social duty to one another or a resignation to the fact that life is hard, and relationships are just another hard thing in them. I love with, and for, absolute joy, so when even if I have a hard day, love is the thing that comforts me, not causes my hard day. So when everything I do in my life to be with the person I love is not compromise, but the obvious decision, and it's never held against them, because the alternative, not being with them would be like walking away from a chest of gold and the solution to world peace. That relationship is too beautiful, and sacrosanct to have in white lighting and without poetry. 

I don't want him to be with me all the time. I don't want to do everything with him. I don't want to know him entirely. I don't want to be his friend. I want madness and passion (which in our case is a dispassionate exchange of heat). I want the excitement of seeing my favourite person. I want the unending desire to serve him and engage with him. I want to indulge the power dynamic between us and play with ritual and devotion. I want to cry and scream. I want to make our bed with the goal to please him with it. I want to comfort his soul. I want to be his sigh of relief and the thing that gives him goosebumps. I want to talk to him forever. I want to touch him. I want to be his slave. I want to swim in the depths of our sexualities. I want to show my vulnerability. I want maddening intimacy. I want a bedroom that is a shrine to the intensity of being with one another. 

I want to indulge in him, always, because he is the treat I get to eat everyday, not the sensible lunch I have to take care of myself. Love is the magic, and it demands my faith in magic. I can't see the magic in playing video games with him.

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