What We Know About Love II

Start

When I met Sven I didn’t expect much. To be honest, at that moment I didn’t expect anything at all. I saw him as he was biting into a cheese sandwich. This picture stayed in my head like a snapshot. A perfect picture. A long shot, slightly sideways, Sven in his brown leather jacket with the fur collar and the beauty spot under his right eye.
Had he stood at a different angle, with a different gesture, or had I looked at him only a few seconds earlier or later, I might not have even noticed him.
I don’t know what I actually saw at that moment. Maybe it was only a fantasy. I can’t even tell if I fell in love. But at that precise moment, everything began.

That night we possibly could have simply missed each other. I would have gone back to the man I didn’t love and would have kept on trying to love him, and Sven would have carried out his plan involving the Danish girl – if our eyes hadn’t locked at that very moment.

What we both didn’t know was that we had encountered one another only two days before at a mutual friend’s place.
I thought he was one of her loony artist friends who made crazy stuff with distorted mirrors, and he thought I was a snobbish photographer chick. I was glad when he finally left.

We didn’t recognize each other only two days later, but that first encounter was as true as the second, when we fell in love.

Sven was different from any other man I had fallen in love with before. He was taller, he was friendlier, and he was blond.

From the beginning there was no trembling, no heart throbbing, no will-he-call-me-or-not – only peace and certainty.
He stayed with me as a matter of course. I didn’t feel harried or threatened, but safe, and there was nothing more beautiful than his presence.

This is happiness, I was thinking one night while I lay in bed and Sven sat in the kitchen, writing.
This is love, I was thinking. Merely knowing he is here gives me peace and serenity. I can love him across the hall through the kitchen door, knowing that he loves me back, even if he is doing something else. We are each of us walking our own way, together.

When he wasn’t with me, I never had to think whether or not I should call him despite having already called him more than three times, or what he would think about me if he knew how much I missed him five minutes after he left the house, because he would call me at such a moment simply to tell me how much he missed me.

I still remember how much I was irritated by the absence of suffering that was usually connected with love. The stomach cramps, wet hands, heart palpitation and insecurity. It was the contrary of all of that. Instead, great peace, happiness, and serenity.

It is so important to know what real love feels like: calm, warm, and bright; not nervous or anxious or frightened or frantic.
Sometimes I even thought maybe that it wasn’t love. But what else could it have been?

2
Loneliness – Togetherness
Or why you can be lonely together

Loneliness

The movie that gave me a better understanding of love was The Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on the novel by Milan Kundera. My neighbor gave me the DVD, and at first I didn’t want to watch it because I found the sex scenes involving a woman wearing a stupid hat quite unbearable.

What really swayed me was Juliette Binoche as Teresa. She works as a waitress in a small bar and reads Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina . Tomas, a doctor, is a masher in front of whom every woman immediately and inexplicably takes off her clothes. He watches Teresa at the swimming pool, follows her unnoticed to the bar, draws her attention to him, and then when she finally notices him acts uninterested in her. He plays his game with her but she falls in love with him, and her love is determined, pure, and intransigent.

She travels to Prague, where he lives, finds him, and never leaves. She is the first woman whom he allows to sleep in his bed. She is passionate. She gives everything and holds nothing back. He continues to sleep with other woman even though he loves her.
That breaks her heart. She doesn’t make him a scene, she doesn’t take him to task; she simply shows her desperation, her vulnerability.
She doesn’t say: “Stop sleeping with other women.” She pleads: “Take me with you. I want to prepare the women for you, I will bathe them and adorn them for you, if you want these women, if it is that important for you, then I will do it together with you. I want to do everything for you. But please, don’t leave me alone, I can’t bear it.

It is not his sleeping with other woman that is unbearable for her but, rather the consequence that it separates him from her.

The story is set in 1968. The Russians invade Prague, and Tomas and Teresa flee to Switzerland. They marry, get a dog, and live happily – until she notices that he is seeing other women again.
She leaves him one morning, taking the dog with her. She leaves him a letter in which she writes how sorry she is, but that she can’t bear the situation of having to live with his lightness of being.
He finally realizes how much he loves her and how little he is without her, and so he follows her to Prague.
This is a fateful step: there is no way back, as his passport is taken away at the border.

Tomas finds Teresa in their former apartment and they fall into each other’s arms. He is not allowed to practice his profession as a brain surgeon until he dissociates himself from an anti-communistic article he had published in a newspaper. He refuses to do so and Teresa supports his decision. He cleans windows and she works in the bar. They are happy because they have found each other again.

One day Teresa smells the odor of another woman on him. She cries out like a wounded animal.
She tries to understand how sex is possible without love and seduces a customer at the bar.
He lives at a rundown apartment block in a tiny seedy flat. It is a brutal, loveless act, which she lets happen in disgust. Later on she learns that she was tricked, filmed secretly by the secret service in order to blackmail her husband.

Teresa and Tomas flee to the countryside, where they live a simple country life. She cooks and reaps, he sows and harvests corn, and together, hand in hand, they walk across the fields while the sun is setting. They have only each other and nature, and they are happy. Tomas says he was never so happy in his whole life. And at the peak of their happiness, after a night dancing in a little country bar, they die in a car accident.

I can’t think of a different ending, because such simple happiness is probably unbearable for very long. As impossible as it was for Adam and Eve to abide in paradise.

Juliette Binoche is still very young in this movie. Her skin is white, her cheeks are red, her brown eyes look sad and serious. She is the embodiment of love.
Teresa loves her husband unconditionally. She never questions him. She loves him the way he is.
Teresa never threatens Tomas, nor does she try to change him. She simply loves him, and when it becomes too much for her, she leaves in order not to break.

Only her love makes him change.
She doesn’t have to pull and drag.
Her love works for her.

Step by step he understands the greatness and the happiness that reside in love.
You can’t remain an asshole when someone loves you so purely and deeply.
Only through love is she able to move his heart and make him change.

What I learned is that what threatens love most is not betrayal, but loneliness.
You can go through everything as long as you go through it together.

If you happen to fall in love with someone else, you come to your husband or your wife and you say: “Help me. I fell in love. I didn’t intend to, but now it’s happened. What can we do to save our love?“

When I don’t feel enough love for my husband, I come to him and say: “Help me, I struggle loving you.”

Of course you don’t do these things, because the other person would go frantic or leave you or blame you forever. That is why you keep your secret for yourself; but when you don’t share it, it will grow between the two of you.

The husband of a friend of ours left her overnight. They had three kids and a happy marriage with the usual problems, so she thought – and suddenly he was gone.
He had had a girlfriend for a long time. He withdrew more and more from his wife. He decided, for himself, that his marriage was not what he wanted and that he could be much happier with another woman.
He didn’t even try to talk to her in order to save their marriage. He sorted it out all by himself.
She never knew about his doubts and still struggles to understand what happened.

I learned that doubt, fear, or past love is no reason to separate. It is something we all have to battle with somehow. It is the loneliness that separates us and drives us apart.

We must love each other with a confidence that allows and forgives everything. It must be possible to be completely honest so that we can talk about things that might be painful, because we know it is much more dangerous to carry it inside all by ourselves.

Anger

I remember it as if it were today. It was a hot summer day in Bangkok, at nine o’clock in the morning, when I chopped one of Elke’s favorite books into pieces and, ashamed, wrapped the remains in a plastic bag. On my way to the supermarket I threw it into a trash bin on Soi Ekkamai. The man at the pancake stall of battered tin gave me a smile with a missing tooth. There was a breeze but I was soaked with sweat.
To this day it seems to me like a crime Dostoyevsky could have come up with. As soon as it was accomplished, an abyss opened in my soul.

How did it start? Why was it Elke’s fault again that I was too angry to work while she peacefully wrote a next bestseller in the second storey of our house in a bamboo grove? The explanation was simple: Elke was not like how Elke was supposed to be: tender, attentive, my lover, and my life companion from early on.
She never served me breakfast and never seduced me in the laundry room. She never mentioned how good I looked when I got up in the morning to wake up the kids und bring them to school. She left me alone; I meant nothing to her. That’s how I saw it and I was not ready to accept that. But what could I do?

The loneliness that led to my anger always began with a detail. I wanted to kiss her before getting up but she had a headache from the evening before. I wanted her to cheer to my new idea for a novel but she had doubts.
She was maybe a bit moody but nothing more. Yet enough for my anger.

Men are strange. Anger is their problem. Anger is the symptom of a blurry kind of weakness, their fear of failure. Men like me quickly let it get to be a huge issue. All of a sudden a fist crashes through the door of the bedroom, the wife panics, the marriage is in pieces.
I have often heard these stories; I’ve lived them. My stepfather was a maniac who threw a tantrum when he did not get what he wanted, even though he often couldn’t articulate what he wanted. He yelled in anger and thrashed everything. He was unstoppable. And when everything was in pieces he repented, often in tears. I was not so different.

I sat in front of our orange-colored iMac while our lovely aid Kuhn Sawai cleaned the big chopping knife and destroyed all traces of paper and fingerprints that could have led to me. Her ex-husband tended to be violent. And I sat there and wasn’t so different.

Did I oversee clues that could give the police a hint about who to look for? Under no circumstances was Elke to find out. I would rather get caned on bare soles or have the Thai police in my house with their stiff uniforms.
Elke would come down curious from the noise and I would tell her, amused, that someone had found a chopped book of ours in a trash bin. Can you believe it, Elke? People have strange ideas nowadays!

But nothing happened. It was just another day in Bangkok. Exotic birds croaked in the high trees and the neighbor’s dogs were creeping around our house looking for love.
I was one of them. I tilted my head and expected Elke to understand my needs. And Elke wasn’t different either. She knew something was going wrong. She knew our love was under attack after the wild beginnings. After an incredible start with awesome kids. She knew that a dangerous loneliness was growing between us even though we lived in Thailand as a family, as writers, and things never looked better.
Like me she did not know why it started to go wrong. But like most other women she didn’t get angry. She was patient.

On this particular morning she did not come down the stairs to check why the house was so unusually quiet. When the kids are quiet, we are always alarmed. But she didn’t come down to massage my neck or to bring me some coffee to solve this dramatic and emotionally tense situation.
She did not come to forgive me! And that made me very angry!

That particular day I did not know how to help myself. I knew from my own family how horrible angry men could be. And I was not the horror, I was a victim!

Heavens, was I angry. And lonely. But Elke didn’t come. She wrote while the bamboo gently rubbed its leaves against the mosquito nets.
Elke was clueless. Maybe unhappy. But she was brave with a man like me.

Our love and marriage weren’t bad; they were extraordinary in comparison. There were always couples and friends who admired us. We stayed together, we supported each other, we had a lot of trust in each other, and we were friends. But behind us lay cracked chairs, dented pot lids, torn toys, and a beer bottle that had the nerve to smash itself into pieces the moment I opened it, very, very thirsty.
The same night I received my first full anesthesia in the Bumrungrat Hospital. Anger made me step onto the broken glass.

Back then Elke often claimed that I like to lie. That was preposterous, and I always picked a fight because of it.
All I tried to explain to her was, for example, how I stepped innocently forward in surprise after the beer bottle broke.
If she had asked why I chopped the book, I would have come up with an even better story. Maybe I mistook it for a block of meat?

Elke knew better. And that made me angry. Elke, having grown up with a younger sister, knows how to patronize others. And she knows how to pick a good fight and how to laugh about it afterwards.
I was raised as a single child, and my mother tells me how I as a chubby and angry toddler painted the walls with crayons. My anger simmers, and I like it, as if this were a very manly thing, a power, a thrust a man like me needs in the jungle of life.

And even though I am unable to pick a good fight, I do it because I’m loaded, because I want love, praise and attention.

An argument is a clash of emotions, and that was what I wanted: noise, yelling, tears, falling into one another’s arms, and love.
That was what I wanted when I picked a fight with Elke that morning because she showed no obedience, because she did not want exactly the same thing I wanted or what I would have done: caress her, hug her, whisper a compliment and sigh full of a love that was so big, so galactic, so romantic it was hard to bear. And she? She instead wanted to write down a dream in which she, Tracy Emin, and Madonna rode on mules on the island of Lanzarote.

The truth is, if I had wanted such a wife, I would not have met Elke. A highly romantic, always touchy, and never-wanting-to-be-alone wife would have driven me mad within two weeks and I would have preferred to stay in bed mornings to write down dreams while she sat downstairs and went bulimic or pulled out her hair in despair or whatever women do instead of smashing furniture.

Elke is right. In many ways. I lied a lot. If you smash the lid of a stainless steel pot against the wall you’d better come up with a good story that explains the hole in the wall and the dent in the lid.
You’d also better come up with a good excuse why the musical toy that hangs above the bed of our two-year-old son is suddenly missing the wire to pull it in action, without seeming suspicious while implying that our son has unpredictable powers.

I always thought of a lie as an overflow of creative energy. Such as a school kid who tells white lies about his exams in order to save his parents from getting high blood pressure.
There are lies for the better, aren’t they? And wasn’t writing novels, which we did for a living, also a form of lying, pure fiction? I liked to lie because it was fun. And not to let Elke have an advantage. It wasn’t right to feel lonely and betrayed and to be wrong!

Worse than anger is the feeling of powerlessness. Worse than anger is the revelation how ridiculous anger is. That makes all anger worse.
It’s always about love. We always expect love, as the world, to submit to how we want it and see it. And that’s why we fail.

Some good friends of ours, whom we trully admire for their wisdom in other things, argue every day. Several times a day. Everybody knows about it because they like to argue with each other in public to feel more justified. You can almost smell how each longs for the love of the other, yet they pick a fight in the most peaceful moments. One provokes, the other reacts. Either way. They get restless from not quarreling.

Both of them are generous. They love to shower us and their other friends with gifts. But towards each other they are stingy and petty and see only the negative side of the other.
They both fight for more sex, love, affection, attention. And as no one will give more then the other they accuse themselves of the most ridiculous things. That he forgot to put sugar in her tea or that she hasn’t washed his favorite t-shirt but only her own socks, or that the sun is shining in his room and not in hers. In the same way I was cross with Elke once because she too noisily ate an apple in bed beside me.

Our constantly fighting friends taught me that one cannot expect love. How many times did I do something nice for Elke, how many times did I surprise her, and she did not instantly thank me or surprise me, and on top of that gave me much less love than I gave her!
How much better off would we be if we competed with love instead of retaliation. I should overwhelm Elke with love and good surprises.
I once read of a Polynesian island where those are held in highest regard who give most, even if that means going into debt just to shower the other with more gifts than he showered you with.

In those years in Bangkok I learned not to trash chairs anymore, not to smash lamps in my way, not to bend iron bars, not to slam laptops on the wall, not to stomp frogs, and not to kill widows anymore.
And there was a simple reason for that. It did not lead me or us anywhere. It didn’t help. And if I were to continue on, we would end up being violent and neglected white trash. Another reason was that the Thais were so overly friendly. There was nothing more embarrassing for them than somebody shouting or being angry.

But why couldn’t Elke love me as I would love her? Why didn’t she surprise me with breakfast, a tête á tête in a small hotel on the Chao Praya River? Why did she not massage my neck when I was writing important emails? Why was she not expecting me on the balcony in a sexy dress when I came back from swimming, feeling lonely and athletic? Why did she not try to keep me from working while dressed up as a geisha or a Red Army commissar with a Mao cap? Why didn’t she sing a song or walk on her hands, or do whatever would show her unconditional love and devotion to me?

She did none of that, not a single thing of all the things I would have done with her. Would have. I felt it was her turn. But did she know that?
Did she know that all my wildness, my crazy energy to sweep her off her feet, was weakening because of all that routine and her die-hard apathy?

Elke probably asked herself the same questions after finishing her first tea of the morning: Why can’t he surprise me and walk up und down in his new boxer shorts, interrupted only by frantic push-ups? Why doesn’t he take me to Paris for a week without the kids? Why can’t he just love me as I love him by making a compliment here and there without touching me constantly when it is too hot for sex? Why can’t he say good morning when I come down the stairs?

Questions all lovers ask themselves secretly without ever saying a word. Love does not need words, they say. How wrong is that!

“What are you up to?” I asked one morning after I missed Elke again downstairs and almost ripped out the cable of the phone.
“I’m writing.” Elke looked up. “Sven, I couldn’t write without you, I never could have.”
“Really? … I thought you write for fame, glory and money like I do. And of course for the fun of it?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t without you. You give me the time and peace to do it.”
“Oh.” I was honestly surprised. “Would you like some more tea?”
“With pleasure.”
“And when I come back I’ll massage your neck,” I suggested.
“Mmmh. And the back as well?”
“Yes!”
I jumped down the stairs and put the kettle on. And while it slowly began to whistle I understood that I always saw our situation from downstairs – never from upstairs like Elke.