Freshly thirty and newly out of a three year relationship, I responded to these major life changes in the only way I knew how: I got on a flight to a foreign country and stayed gone for three months.
There’s a mysterious clarity that comes after leaving a major relationship. Suddenly you can see everything that went wrong, that wasn’t right for you, and you vow to yourself moving forward to never let that happen again. I don’t know if I can claim I’ve made any vows; however, I have discovered that in the modern world’s fixation on monogamy versus polyamory, on marriage and children, and on situationships and friendzones, we’ve lost sight of something major, something better: lovers. Instead of honing in on all the boring details, we need to bring back the glamorous, messy, easy practice of taking a lover.
I have a juxtaposing internal feeling towards love. I feel both that it is the ultimate truth that guides all our actions, and that the way love is approached in the current era is counterintuitive to a free and agented romance that allows one to embrace being their fullest self. The end goal of life can’t be coupling with another unless we want the very essence that nurtures our inner selves to be dependent on someone else. Nor can it be a complete isolation from love and romance, a distancing that protects, yet leaves one lonely. And then of course, whatever it was that I had just left, where domestic bliss became like looking into a rage-fueled mirror, could not be right either. If love is going to be part of my life, which I very much want it to be, I’ve decided it will be in the form of a lover.
What does it mean to be a lover in a modern sense? Simply to be one who loves, beyond the context of a monogamous relationship. Love does not have to exist within the dynamics of a serious partnership nor is it necessarily found in the gamified landscape of dating apps. A lover is someone with whom you share intimacy, respect, passion, and laughs. It’s someone who you enjoy being with, and who enjoys being with you. Mostly, it’s someone with whom romance is the priority. Sometimes, a lover can be your wife, or husband, or long-term partner, though the burdens of daily domestic partnership often dampen romance’s ability to be prioritized. Most relationships start as lovers, and I would argue many should enjoy staying there. The point of intimacy does not have to be marriage, children, or a lifelong commitment of any kind. The point of intimacy is to be seen and understood by another. That’s where lovers thrive.
What does it mean to be a lover in a modern sense? Simply to be one who loves, beyond the context of a monogamous relationship.
When I was in Europe unpacking the leftover explosion of my life, I took a few lovers. I enjoyed the idea that this kind of intimacy combined with freedom is possible. I had felt incredibly limited before and suddenly my whole world was expanding constantly. I was experiencing kindness, flirtation, attraction and experimentation, all in a short course of time and for the first time in a long time. This led to the realization that lovers may be the perfect dynamic when one truly wants to be in charge of their own life. I didn’t owe them much, aside from some communication and respect, and I didn’t need to consider them more than I wanted to in my daily life. They didn’t owe me that either. I didn’t have to be anything other than myself. Some I still talk to and flirt with, others not so much, but there’s no devastation. My life is stable and safe. Unlike ending a relationship where you live with someone, your books combined on the shelves, ending a dynamic with a lover can feel more like two individuals walking down two separate paths, not the destruction of a shared reality.
New experiences allow an expansion of perspective. Each person I have grown to care for in the act of being their lover is unique and different; they all bring out a new understanding of myself. I recall being a child and wondering why adults around me were unhappy and stagnant, which partially had to do with the nature of the working class condition but also relationships of intimacy built solely on survival and not on any sort of love. I withhold judgement, but I knew even then that I want to live a life full of experience, beautiful and kind people in friendships and in love, and even more so I want a life of ecstatic freedom and change. Beyond the compartmentalization of one’s love object into a role is the agency of true care, there is more love in a night out dancing at a club with a beautiful woman than in picking out silverware.