On Loving Across a Difference You Can’t Close

Exactly fifteen years ago I ended a marriage because I couldn’t love across the differences. It was more than one. Fifteen years ago, the day I got divorced I wrote this to myself, in a mélange of hope and fear, and today I choose to share these raw, intimate pages of my journal, because maybe someone out there needs it. I also chose to write an essay about this subject in an instrument key because my ex-husband played the piano. It only seems so appropriate as a metaphor. Loving across a real divide is a condition you inhabit, and when you learn how to do it, when you learn how to “tune” your instruments (that’s what most people think we need to do, but you’ll see that I suggest another verb and another approach), then it is playable.

Find me a nice soft place to land. Somewhere quiet, somewhere small and somewhere mine, so I can start. We just love new beginnings and even more, we love the idea of a beginning. New dawn. Our birth, rise and ascent are one and the same. Contrary to intuition, we don’t love it because it’s new or crisp or fresh. We love it because it’s BETTER. We want to be better. Constantly improving us, on the move, wireless, upgraded. And whenever we hit the wall, we go back a few steps and start over. Delete the cache. Regrettably, you can’t go back in time packed with all your knowledge, and understanding of your state and condition. Can’t touch the past. But mind you, it is possible to return to NOW. Just imagine, if you could go back to the present, knowing what you know, what would you change?

So, we start over, every day the same again. Our mind is on repeat: tomorrow I will be better. I need to get better. And here’s how it usually goes. First, you prepare your rest. Change doesn’t come easy, and you know that. You have to be rested, you have to unwind. Soon, all your thoughts will need to sum up, you know you’ll need to focus, you’ll need to drive, to maintain steady. Get your s**t together: you slap yourself in front of the mirror. Your mind has to be ready: your body has to be fit. We just love to prepare. Even more than beginnings, we love to prepare for them. Then follows the fasting. Before the new comes into play, you have to purge the last. Last junk meal, last bad relationship, last bad movie, last feeling of guilt, change the desktop picture, last time you slack, last hour wasted. Our body needs to be clean, habits need to be broken. You have to start remembering what you really liked, what’s yours and what’s fake, just attached to you somehow along the way. How did you even get used to this? While you cut down on things in your mind, you start to be aware of your primordial self, the clean, innocent, wise, primordial you, who used to know better, who used to be complete, who needed nothing, who knew exactly what it wants and likes, who knows exactly what to do. You are slowly aware, lucid, of the image you wished for yourself, a view of things you used to imagine a while ago and you know that this beginning has to bring you closer to that self.

A change you can believe in. So, you set out, follow that impression of yourself, hanging like a carrot in front of your hungry eyes. You set out, ready and absolved, ready to redeem yourself. You start to feel good again, this is spiritual s**t, and it gets the juices going. You feel powerful again. So, you instantly start to need things: stuff, lots of stuff. Because they will certainly be your key to the fast and certain accomplishment of our desires.

Like this. Tomorrow I will start writing. But I need a new computer, and that new app that deletes phrases if you slack, and pens and new notebooks I’ll need to do my research, I can’t just write about anything. I write better at night, so I’ll need to wake up late, be fresh when I come home. You’re going to start a new life, think big, and start it in style.

Needless to say, these needs are like little black dominoes. One falls and it brings down the submarine. Put you right back at the starting line, which is fine with you, we just established how you like beginnings. Here are our dominoes. We need a voice! A venue to express ourselves, honestly and creatively, a place that judges on praise and excellence. We need talented, skilled minds that want to be better, who are curious, intrigued and inquisitive, people that hate lying around the dirt when the prize is slightly beyond their reach. We need to find our gold standard, unapologetic, straight forward and start counting our achievements. Give credit where credit is due. We need to be under the influence, crazy and obsessed, blindly believing that this is it, our one life, not spread on too much bread nor wasted behind safe walls. These are our horses, our dominoes.

Bottom line, I must endure and pull through. I must succeed without complaining or being weary. I am an aspirer. I am doing it all, mastering nothing. And it will be much worse until it will be better. But I have stamina. I have all the data to succeed. I am rested and I am purged and absolved. There’s nothing holding me back. I am fountainhead, unwilling to compromise my future. Unf**k the future!!!

I have found my soft place and I want to land.

Stack twelve perfect fifths, one honest fifth on top of the last, and you should climb back to the note you started from, seven octaves up, the same note, only higher and thinner. You don’t. You overshoot. By a sliver so thin it took centuries to agree how to spell it, and it has a name, the Pythagorean comma, and it is the reason no instrument you have ever heard, not one, was in tune.

Every piano in every hall you have ever sat in is lying to you. In twelve places at once. The tuner who prepared it did not fail; the tuner distributed a failure that cannot be removed, only placed. This is the first thing you must know about difference, and almost nobody who gives advice about love seems to know it. The gap is in the mathematics. It was there since forever. You did not cause it and you will not be the one to heal it, and the entire art, is what you do with a wrongness you are not permitted to delete.

I have been thinking about this because of the differences that refuse to shrink. I don’t mean the quarrels that resolve if you both sleep on it, but the distance in a marriage that ten years leaves exactly where it found it, that neither of you is wrong about, that no amount of talking absorbs because it was never an argument in the first place; it was a fact about two people who were tuned in different rooms before they ever met.

Faith is often one. One of you feels a floor under the world and the other feels the world hang over nothing, and no dinner conversation has moved that floor an inch. Class is another, the deep one, the one people lie about the most, the difference in what your body expects a room to owe it. Language. Not which language, though that too; the temperature of the words, how much a sentence is allowed to hold before it becomes rude to say the thing plainly. And a last one, that I will reveal later, which is the word I actually want, because it is also the tuning word, and everything I am going to say lives inside that double.

The mistake looks as if it is expensive. We treat these as problems. A problem has a solution, and a solution is a place where the problem stops existing, so we set to work: closing, converting, translating, persuading, waiting for time to do the persuading we could not manage.

We are certain that a love with a permanent gap in it is a love that has not finished being made. So we keep tuning. We keep reaching for the pin. And the reaching is what breaks it. Again, not the gap! The reaching!

Because a difference of this type is not a problem as everyone might think. That difference is a condition, which is the thing you live inside of rather than the thing you repair, and mistaking the second for the first has ruined more good love than cruelty ever has. Cruelty at least is very visible and felt. This, on the other hand, does its damage while both people believe they are being devoted. They are only re-tuning each other forever and calling the noise intimacy.

At this point people run two fantasies, and both fail, and they fail in opposite directions, which is why the couples who hold each one look across at the other with such contempt. The first is purity. Tune every interval perfectly, refuse every compromise, insist that two people who truly love each other will eventually agree about God and about money, and about all the smaller endless business of how loud a house is allowed to be. The second is that you should not have to tune at all, that love means never touching the pins, leaving both instruments exactly as they arrived and calling the resulting mess “honesty”. One couple sands itself down to a single shared note. The other refuses to share a note and then wonders why nothing they play together resolves.

There is a third thing, older than either, worked out by people who had to build instruments that could actually be played, and it is neither purity nor surrender, and it is the only one that works. It has a name too.

I will tell you what it is, and what it takes, and why the couples who learn it stop trying to close the gap and start doing the one thing the gap has always asked of them.