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I’m in a new relationship. Pretty new, anyway. New enough to still be feeling the warmth and sparkle of infatuation, old enough to be settling in and discovering each others’ facts and quirks.
I’ve lived long enough to think of my life in terms of eras, and I identify each era by the relationship that defined it. Every relationship comes with its own life lessons and challenges, and it’s those challenges and lessons that stay with me when I’m characterizing the eras. There’s a metaphor I think of when I think about this: It’s learning how to play different pieces of music on the piano.
For a long time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, I was learning how to be a single woman, learning how to meet my needs through friendship and community and the pleasures of solitude, learning how to live in my own house and take care of it, both literally and figuratively. That was kind of like learning how to play "Home on the Range," a song that wasn’t too hard but took a lot of practice.
I got pretty good at it, and then life took it away and gave me something that was hard, in 2003: a relationship with a guy who had an unhappy ex-wife who wanted to get back with him, four great children, and maybe untreated bipolar illness. That one was kind of like a Beethoven symphony, with lots of ups and downs, soaring violins, crashing symbols, and a sense that there was some meaningful story in the music. It took me a long time to get any good at all at that one, and I never really did master it. I learned how to stay out of other people’s conflicts and a lot about my own childhood traumas as they got recycled, more or less—acted out on the stage of the present-day relationship. (It was almost unbelievable how many parallels there were between the circumstances of my childhood and those of the relationship. The learning was phenomenal, which made it all worthwhile.)
The next music I got, after that guy went away, came in the form of an old friend who was struggling with alcoholism. This one was more sedate, halting, and easier to master than the Beethoven symphony, sort of like "Gymnopedie No. 1" by Eric Satie. The issues were intermittent—he’d be fine for a few months, then seriously not fine for a few weeks, then fine again. And besides, we were friends, not lovers. But there was some slightly sticky connection between us, some sense of responsibility on my end, that made it more complicated than just friendship. It was a longstanding pattern; we had been friends for 30 years with a gap of about 9 years. When he moved back to town and we started hanging out again after Beethoven went away, I had another chance to learn that piece of music again. We are still close friends, but over time, I’ve gotten better at detaching from his alcoholism, letting him make his own mistakes and recover from them as he can.
And now I have this new relationship. I’m thinking of this one as learning how to play a duet, maybe "Heart and Soul." It’s still early days and I’m not sure what the lessons will be, but I’m thinking they’ll have to do with learning how to play on my own end of the keyboard, focusing on my part of the duet instead of focusing on his. This sounds simple, and it would be simple if we were talking about real piano-playing, but in a relationship, as I’ve already learned from my times with Beethoven and Eric Satie and with my friends, it’s easy to get hung up on what someone else is doing and ignore your own end; easier to know how someone else should play the song of their life than to change how you play your own. And when you do that, it creates dissonance and discord and generally makes a mess of the tune.
It does matter who you’re trying to play with. Back when I was working on learning the Beethoven symphony, that is, when I was in a relationship with the guy who had the ex-wife and children and possible bipolar illness, it was like he was playing his song and I was playing mine and mine was being drowned out by his, although I learned how to play mine anyway, albeit very quietly. This is the first time I’ve ever actually played a song where the other person was playing it at the same time and at the same pace and in the same way.
And so far I like it—I like it quite a lot. It’s more fun, and the music is sweeter and easier to play.
