What We Know About Love

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We have loved each other for fourteen years. That is the age of our son plus one. Or our daughter’s plus three. Not that we planned to have children. It just happened. Like falling in love, it came without a warning.

After twelve years, seven books and four moves between three different countries, we married at the Home Affairs Office in a small provincial town in South Africa, set between a gas station and a butcher shop. We became husband and wife while a group of prisoners in orange overalls and foot chains shuffled down the hall.

We married again this year. The church was an old community hall, the pastor a surfer in jeans. We celebrated in our garden with seventy friends and three giant pots of chili con carne.
We were happy and as much in love as during our first days. We thought that we had really made it, that we had conquered something so many people failed to.
We were still in love after so many years. We obviously knew something that many couples didn’t. We wanted to share our secret with the world, so we decided to write this book.

Filled with excitement we started to write, but before we knew it we were in the middle of a crisis. Suddenly our love seemed to be a story of fights, loneliness, and compromises.

We had to look closer. We decided to go back to the start, and we realized we had to be honest until it hurts if we wanted to save our love and make it grow.

With this book we removed layer after layer and learned more and more. We rediscovered our love and gained an understanding that we want to share.

Our love is unique; but like many others, we have children, conflicting characters, dreams and hopes, emotional and financial struggles, mothers-in-law, and unfulfilled desires. What we share is not a biography; it’s a testimony of a love that lies within all relationships, good and bad.
We show respect for the adventure called love that is greater than all of us.

Elke Naters and Sven Lager, August 2007

Love

Throughout my life I have fallen in love for many reasons. I fell in love with men because they had gaps in their teeth, because they were brilliant dancers, were extraordinary kissers, were Scotsmen, because they wanted me or I wanted them, or someone else wanted them, because I didn’t want to be alone, or because they gave me exactly what I needed at that time.

And I fell in love with men in spite of the fact they didn’t love me, in spite of the fact they couldn’t dance or kiss or weren’t Scottish, or had no teeth, in spite of the fact they clung, or were deaf or addicted, in spite of the fact they didn’t want anything I wanted.
But they all were beautiful.

I loved some of them for only a moment, a moment that flashed the fulfillment of all my desires and all my dreams come true. Others I loved for a night, a day, a week, a month, or for years.
I even spent time with a man I didn’t love, hoping I could love him someday, desperate to find any love at all.

Then there was the man I fell for most, the one I considered my greatest love. This love was when jealousy kept me awake, when my happiness depended on how well we got along, when my whole day evolved around the moment he finally had time to see me. He determined my time and my life.
When I was desperate because I didn’t feel loved enough, I cheated on him.
I tried to fall in love with other men, but it didn’t work out, because I did everything because of him.
At that time I thought that this is the way real love feels. That this is passion. Who wants lukewarm relationships? I wanted the real thing and I had it. Obviously.

I had lost myself in love. It was a beautiful, great love, but it was very unhealthy.
The man I loved was something I idealized. In my mind I made him complete. Everything he wasn’t was what I desired him to be. And yet I was frustrated that he wasn’t the way I wanted him to be.
Why couldn’t he be more attentive, more sensitive, loving and less self-sufficient. Why couldn’t he spend more time with me, why couldn’t it all be perfect? Wasn’t love meant to be like that? Perfect?

I was frustrated that the real man didn’t match the ideal man in my mind. The more desperate I became, the more I wanted him to be the way I wanted him; and I thought that because I loved him so much in spite of all his shortcomings, he must be my true love, and so I clung to him even more.

One day I realized that I loved my dream man more than the real man. My true love was the man that he could be. The man that could have made me happy.
Many years later I realized I had expectations for him that he couldn’t possibly fulfill. And that I blamed him for not being the man I wanted him to be. For not loving me the way I wanted him to love me. I didn’t look at the things he did do for me but at the thing he did not.

Twenty years later I became aware that I blamed him for the failure of our relationship, while it was actually my fault. He had loved me as well as he could, but he was never good enough for me. I repented, and with repentance came healing.

I can’t go back and make everything right, but I can learn from the experience and do it all better the next time.
I had to change my idea of love in order to find happiness. From a love that kept me from sleeping and eating, a love that was overwhelming, unrealistic, absorbing and self-destructive, into a love that strengthens me and my beloved, a love that lasts.

Today I don’t want a man who breaks my heart, but one who loves me and supports me. A man with whom I can grow and with whom I walk side by side into a love greater than life itself.

Salvation

Elke saved me the day I planned to run away with a bisexual Danish girl that drank too much.
Elke and I have spent nearly every day together since then, and we never grew tired of telling each other how wonderfully we saved each other on that very day. Just the mere probability of meeting each other that day was one in a million.

For eight years we had never met, though we were living in the same town, had many of the same friends, and were at the same memorable parties. We never recognized each other until the day I had my first and only exhibition as a sculptor. And then we fell in love the moment I bit into a cheese sandwich und she laughed.

When I say Elke saved me, there was more. We must have met before in our desperate and lonely years, but we didn’t see each other. I didn’t recognize Elke as the woman who belonged to me.

I was blind up until that very day in December 1993 when a higher power opened my eyes. I was blind, stuck in the mud, and clueless, even though everything had begun euphorically in my life: my studies at university, all of my jobs, my time as a DJ and critic at a radio station. Every love to an idea, to work, or to a girl I began with enthusiasm, until the moment the zest of those new beginnings faded, and I left.
And when it wasn’t I myself loosing grip, it was something else darkening the sunshine of my spotless mind. The radio broadcasting company I worked for full time at no pay went bankrupt at the height of my career. Or it was the ex-boyfriend of my then girlfriend killing himself. Before that happened, she merely longed for him from time to time. Now he succeeded in coming between us as a dead man.

The years before I met Elke I drifted on the surface of an ocean, paddling towards where I might glimpse land, full of hope, wanting to reach paradise with my own strength. But I failed.
I grew up with the idea that I alone could create my fate. I believed only I could write and direct the story of my life. I believed I had to because nobody else was in charge.
Nothing great came out of it. And then it dawned on me like on so many others in their late twenties: Your great expectations aren’t so easy to meet. Life seemed to have different rules.

Elke often asks me to tell her the story of how we met that day. How I was swept away and blinded by her beauty. She still doesn’t understand how dazed I was having finally met her that I spent the night on the couch of my ex-girlfriend, who was still dreaming of her dead ex-boyfriend.
And Elke still doesn’t understand my grim determination for having a random Danish girl to be the love of my life.

“What did you want from that girl? What kind of plan was this?” she would ask. It’s difficult to explain.
It’s a man’s thing. Like the game Jackass is a man’s thing. Like climbing Kilimanjaro on your hands and knees is a man’s thing, as it is to build a model of an early Fender Stratocaster with Swedish matchsticks. Men don’t stop even when they realize the nonsense of what they’re doing. Only a miracle can stop them. My miracle was Elke.

The only thing I believed in back then was action. I had to take things into my own hands. I had to do something, anything, to get out of the darkness I was in because of my actions.
I didn’t have a clue of the divine plan. I had no idea there was a schedule beyond my understanding. For me life itself was like the Salt Lake Desert, where the world’s fastest cars are tested. Lots of space in every direction. And it all looks the same. What went wrong?

It looked as if until that day in December I was falling in love with the wrong women. I was tired. I didn’t want to start all over again. That’s why I decided to do the exact opposite of everything I had been doing before.
I looked at it scientifically. When a scientist gets stuck, he has to try the improbable. Or else the scientist succeeds as if by heavenly intervention, something coming about by pure chance, as was it was with the discovery of penicillin as well as many other world-changing discoveries. But where was my heavenly intervention? I had to do the intervening myself.

The complete opposite of the woman of my dreams was: not tall, not funny, not optimistic, not loving, not clever, not dark haired. My plan was to avoid falling in love with a woman that met my desires, and with one instead that would not trigger my Pavlovian reflexes. I decided to arrange my next love.

As the exhibition in the old factory was filling up, I noticed the Danish girl. She seemed the perfect opposite of my dream girl. Her nose was reddened from too much drinking and sleep deprivation, and her face was pale and tense. She frowned when she saw my sculptures on the wall and then laughed loudly with a friend of hers. When I touched her shoulder she jumped back.

She was in a weird way funny and attractive. If we had met under different circumstances I’m sure we would have become friends. But we met at the wrong time.
Eager to follow my plan, I imagined stumbling with her over empty Vodka bottles in the morning and discussing French art theory at noon with bad hangovers we were trying to cure by chain-smoking. I wanted to challenge life with her; I wanted to challenge life with a love so impossible it had to be true.

I didn’t even know if there were vodka bottles lying around in her flat or if she liked French philosophy.
I was two heads taller than she was. We chatted briefly about Denmark. The crowd around us was humming happily, soul music emanated from a ghetto blaster, and the grey winter day on the other side of the windows made the art inside look good. Then all of a sudden there was a vibe I felt: that the impossible was possible. The Dane and I were boring each other with small talk – but soon I would speak Danish and give the art academy another try. I would love her with everything I had, whether she wanted it or not. I felt drunk from what I saw in a futuristic neon light: my years with a Danish girl who laughed hard and loud like a man. I had to hold onto the table with the wine and cheese.
With sudden hunger, I bit into a cheese sandwich and looked up. There she was: tall, beautiful, cool, dark haired, joyful. She was laughing like an Italian country girl, very feminine, with stars in her eyes.
She stood at the other side of the table with a friend and looked at me. That’s when God’s plan kicked in. I never thought of the Danish girl again; she and I were both now safe from my evil plan.

Years later I woke up in a giant, freezing apartment with two kids, a tired wife, no job, no money – but I was happy.
Today I know how close I was to losing faith in my own life. Not through murder, rape, death, or illness, but simply through emptiness. Before I met Elke I had lost the plot.

As a child I was happy with the vastness of life and happy that there were many great things in store for me. Life seemed abundant, like a tree full of ripe cherries you’d never be able to eat by yourself. But the night before my first and last exhibition I was lying on my bed and staring at the sepia patterns some rainwater had left on the ceiling. I was like one of those patterns: meaningless and fading into nothing.
That night I could not take it anymore. Hey, Universe, why don’t you want me to participate in all the amazing stuff in the world? Why do I have to be broke and staring at stains in a lonely flat in Berlin? Why don’t you want me to become a famous artist or writer? Why don’t you lead me straight to the love of my life or to all the adventures my heart is longing for?
I started to understand Hitler. Why he set up his evil schemes to rule the world after the art academy had rejected him.

“Thank you.” I said to Elke just a couple of weeks ago.
“No, thank you.”
“No seriously, you saved me.”
“No, you saved me. Without you I would have married a man with pointy shoes whom I didn’t love at all.”
“Without you I would speak Danish with a heavy accent and snort heroin.”

We made this a running gag in the last years. But the truth is, we didn’t save each other. Love is not a just a potion that gives us super powers for getting out of the mud. Love is the beginning; love is a challenge we decide to take.

When I am at the video store with my kids, I see that nearly all love films are about the salvation through the man or woman of our dreams. It’s a Hollywood thing. These films always end just when they start to get interesting. Does nobody want to know what happens after the Happy Ending? What happens after you have found the love of your life? And how do you then learn to grow and keep this love safe?
The Hollywood salvation is a modern misunderstanding in a world full of singles. The main misunderstanding nowadays is that true love will set you free. Free from what? In fact it just leaves you clueless with your savior.
It took me years to learn that Elke couldn’t save me. That she couldn’t save me from the world, from my own emptiness, or from myself.

Søren Kierkegaard’s love to Regine Olson is a good, and sad, example of expectations that are too high.
Kierkegaard was a melancholic idealist who loved parties, prostitutes, and the lonely hours in the Copenhagen of the 19th century. He was deeply in love with the younger Regine Olson, and she with him. But after a year of engagement he broke it off, telling her that he would never be able to be completely honest with her.
He was afraid of a love that he was incapable of. He wanted to save her from his imperfection, whether she wanted this or not. He was afraid. From that point on he wrote constantly in his diary about Regine. After she married a wealthy and less hesitant merchant, he was not allowed to see her. It seemed as if most of his philosophy evolved around the absent girl.

Kierkegaard’s dream of a pure love was impossible. Rather than trying to love her as best as he could, he broke up with his only love. He did not take up the challenge to grow by loving and being loved.
He knew what he missed: “To betray one’s love is the worst betrayal; it is an everlasting loss one can never replace, neither in this time nor in eternity.“
To marry his beloved Danish girl wouldn’t have saved him. But it would have revealed to him what he later discovered in solitude: that you have to live and experience truth to understand it.

If I had decided against love and followed my plans with the Danish girl, I might now be a rich and famous sculptor with a villa in Rio de Janeiro. Maybe we would have kids in a Swiss boarding school while we raved on ecstasy in Japan. Maybe we would have found friendship or meaning. Or maybe not. But for sure, one way or another my evil plan would have backfired.
By falling in love with Elke I got a chance to learn life differently. With Elke and my children I learned to love.
Since then I praise every day with Elke. I still feel empty when she is gone for longer than two days. I still feel like a useless stain on the ceiling even when she is around, but I feel a transformation. Every night I kiss my kids and thank God for them. I kiss them when they are asleep and can’t complain.
My children move my heart deeply every single day. They give purpose to my life. But they are not my salvation and I can never be theirs.

Believing that Elke saved me that day nearly destroyed our love and marriage.
Many couples fail because they expect their savior to continue on with his or her miraculous work. Many fail because the reward of love is challenge and not leisure.

Kierkegaard learned from his failure: “What counts is to take the risk to completely be yourself; just yourself before God, on your own with the tremendous strain and tremendous responsibility.”

What saved me that grey December day was my decision to love Elke even before I finished my cheese sandwich.
Knowing that I have to work for this love has saved me.
But what changed my heart back then was a greater power

………..

©btb, Random House