Selfless, Cold and Composed

At bookclub last night, we had a really fascinating conversation about love, relationships, marriage, divorce... There are six of us in the group, five women and one man, and only one of us is on our first marriage. We talked about whether we'd outgrown the institution of marriage, as a society, at least the storybook version of it. We talked about why some people are still together and others not, and one of the themes was about yielding to your partner. Some amount of yielding is needed on both sides -- but too much can be a bad thing both for the yielding partner and the one to whom the other is yielding. What determines how much is too much, though? Isn't it more about what works for the two people in the relationship rather than some idealized version of what should be true?

One of the members mentioned this song by Ben Folds Five, which I think contains an interesting exploration of this issue:

I said what you wanted to hear

And what I wanted to say

So I'll take it back

Sometimes we do say what the other person wants to hear partly because it is what they want to hear and partially because it is as true for us as anything else we could say in that moment. I think that's maybe the hardest part of being in a relationship. When you know your own heart, it is much easier to communicate that to the other person. But who among us does, for the first marriage, at least, know our own heart to a great extent? Are the ones that stay married the ones who better knew themselves going in or the ones who were lucky enough to pick someone whose heart needed much the same, or a complement to, what theirs needed? Or some combination of both? And how about for the second or third time around?

I don't have the answers. I do know that although, as a general rule, the words selfless, cold and composed don't describe me, the more my thoughts, words and actions veer off in that direction, the shittier I feel. I think that's what this lyric is getting at:

It's easy to be easy and free

When it doesn't mean anything

And I think that's also what Janis is saying about freedom in Me and Bobby McGee.

These matters of the heart are all very interesting to yours truly. But I need to be careful not to let my brain try to tell my heart what to do...