“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. I meant it with every flaw in my being.
“Would you like to know my worst faults now?” Felipe asked.
I must admit that I thought to myself, I already know your worst faults, mister. But before I could speak, he relayed the facts quickly and bluntly, as only a man who is all too familiar with himself can do.
“I’ve always been good at making money,” he said, “but I never learned how to save the shit. I drink too much wine. I was overprotective of my children and I’ll probably always be overprotective of you. I’m paranoid-my natural Brazilianness makes me that way-so whenever I misunderstand what’s going on around me, I always assume the worst. I’ve lost friends because of this, and I always regret it, but that’s just the way I am. I can be antisocial and temperamental and defensive. I am a man of routine, which means I’m boring. I have very little patience with idiots.” He smiled and tried to leaven up the moment. “Also, I can’t look at you without wanting to have sex with you.”
“I can work with that,” I said.
There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. I say this because listing our flaws so openly to each other was not some cutesy gimmick, but a real effort to reveal the points of darkness contained in our characters. They are no laughing matter, these faults. They can harm. They can undo. My narcissistic neediness, left unchecked, has every bit as much potential to sabotage a relationship as Felipe’s financial daredevilry, or his hastiness to assume the worst in moments of uncertainty. If we are at all self-aware, we work hard to keep these more dicey aspects of our natures under control, but they don’t go away. Also good to note: If Felipe has character flaws that he cannot change in himself, it would be unwise of me to believe that I could change them on his behalf. Likewise in reverse, of course. And some of the things that we cannot change about ourselves are mirthless to behold. To be fully seen by somebody, then, and to be loved anyhow-this is a human offering that can border on the miraculous.
With all respect to the Buddha and to the early Christian celibates, I sometimes wonder if all this teaching about nonattachment and the spiritual importance of monastic solitude might be denying us something quite vital. Maybe all that renunciation of intimacy denies us the opportunity to ever experience that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness. “All human beings have failings,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote. (And she-one-half of a very complex, sometimes unhappy, but ultimately epic marriage-knew what she was talking about.) “All human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who have lived together over long years get to know one another’s failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.”
Maybe creating a big enough space within your consciousness to hold and accept someone’s contradictions-someone’s idiocies, even-is a kind of divine act. Perhaps transcendence can be found not only on solitary mountaintops or in monastic settings, but also at your own kitchen table, in the daily acceptance of your partner’s most tiresome, irritating faults.
I’m not suggesting that anyone should learn to “tolerate” abuse, neglect, disrespect, alcoholism, philandering, or contempt, and I certainly don’t think that couples whose marriages have become fetid tombs of sorrow should simply buck up and deal with it. “I just didn’t know how many more coats of paint I could put on my heart,” a friend of mine said in tears after she had left her husband-and who, with any sort of conscience, would reproach her for ditching that misery? There are marriages that simply rot over time, and some of them must end. Leaving a blighted marriage is not necessarily a moral failure, then, but can sometimes represent the opposite of quitting: the beginning of hope.
So, no, when I mention “tolerance,” I’m not talking about learning how to stomach pure awfulness. What I am talking about is learning how to accommodate your life as generously as possible around a basically decent human being who can sometimes be an unmitigated pain in the ass. In this regard, the marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgiveness, as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Mundane this may be, yes. Devoid of any rock-star moments of divine ecstasy, certainly. But maybe such tiny acts of household tolerance are a miracle in some other way-in some quietly measureless way-all the same?
And even beyond the flaws, there are just some simple differences between Felipe and me that we will both have to accept. He will never-I promise you-attend a yoga class with me, no matter how many times I may try to convince him that he would absolutely love it. (He would absolutely not love it.) We will never meditate together on a weekend spiritual retreat. I will never get him to cut back on all the red meat, or to do some sort of faddish fasting cleanse with me, just for the fun of it. I will never get him to smooth out his temperament, which burns at sometimes exhausting extremes. He will never take up hobbies with me, I am certain of this. We will not stroll through the farmer’s market hand in hand, or go on a hike together specifically to identify wildflowers. And although he is happy to sit and listen to me talk all day long about why I love Henry James, he will never read the collected works of Henry James by my side-so this most exquisite pleasure of mine must remain a private one.
Similarly, there are pleasures in his life that I will never share. We grew up in different decades in different hemispheres; I sometimes miss his cultural references and jokes by a mile. (Or, I should say, by a kilometer.) We never raised children together, so Felipe can’t reminisce to his partner for hours on end about what Zo and Erica were like when they were little kids-as he might have done had he stayed married to their mother for thirty years. Felipe relishes fine wines almost to the point of holy rapture, but any good wine is wasted on me. He loves to speak French; I don’t understand French. He would prefer to linger lazily in bed with me all morning, but if I’m not awake and doing something productive by dawn, I begin to twitch with a kind of ferocious Yankee mania. Moreover, Felipe will never have as quiet a life with me as he might want. He’s solitary; I am not. Like a dog, I have pack needs; like a cat, he prefers a quieter house. As long as he is married to me, his house will never be quiet.
And may I add: This is only a partial list.
Some of these differences are significant, others not so much, but all of them are inalterable. In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy. We humans come into this world-as Aristophanes so beautifully explained-feeling as though we have been sawed in half, desperate to find somebody who will recognize us and repair us. (Or re-pair us.) Desire is the severed umbilicus that is always with us, always bleeding and wanting and longing for flawless union. Forgiveness is the nurse who knows that such immaculate mergers are impossible, but that maybe we can live on together anyhow if we are polite and kind and careful not to spill too much blood.
There are moments when I can almost see the space that separates Felipe from me-and that always will separate us-despite my lifelong yearning to be rendered whole by somebody else’s love, despite all my efforts over the years to find someone who would be perfect for me and who, in turn, would allow me to become some sort of perfected being. Instead, our dissimilarities and our faults hover between us always, like a shadowy wave. But sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of Intimacy herself, balancing right there on that very wave of difference-actually standing there right between us-actually (heaven help us) standing a chance.