lying in wait (on romance part two only I'm going to stop with the "part x" nomenclature now this is just a newsletter about romance I guess)
What the lover learns early is how to wait. Even in the best of circumstances, there are gaps – contained in time or in space – that are impossible to cross. In The Selfishness of Others, Kristen Dombek writes:
…now he is here all the time, he won't leave, and even so close by, his mind – the other’s mind – can turn strange and blank. You can fill in the blank with stories about coldness and stories of evil. You can try to chase it down, rope it, you can make war on it, but it will still be blank. You can rage against your dependency, the absolute need for the other that can never be satiated, but the other is, in their own way and not through their own fault, the very center of their universe and there is a part of that centrality that will always be empty of you. You can study it and theorize it, but if the blank were not still bottomless, love would not ever go on long.
For Ernaux, waiting transforms her desire into something revolting. I can identify with the sentiment – so much of the time I have spent waiting was unasked of me and yet, I insisted. It has been hard for me to make sense of the time I spent waiting, as it was a space where I allowed resentment to grow and where I understood what it would mean to give oneself away. Waiting as a verb is ironic, as it is an action that is not an action. It’s an action that hinges entirely on inaction, such that waiting becomes a kind of purgatory, a time-space where the only thing occurring is not a thing but anticipation of a thing.
The places I waited for him: my bed, my couch, my kitchen table. Lying on the itchy carpet of my bedroom. My sister’s room. What was I waiting for? I can only assume it was his gaze, so I would know that I was alive and worth being perceived. This sounds sad and actually, it was quite sad. Like Ernaux, I resented the “desire” underpinning all the waiting. I resented it more because it hadn’t been asked of me. Suppose we are constituted by how we spend our time (are we?); time spent waiting, then, time spent in anticipation of an action becomes a way of doing nothing, being nothing. At some point, it’s impossible to say when, maybe it had been before we even met, I had become more like a shell than a person, hollowed out by time.
Suppose we are not constituted by how we spend our time. It was pointed out to me via a Tik Tok that we love and admire babies even though they are functionally useless. They do nothing that could be considered “productive” beyond carrying the promise of one day propagating the species. Yet, we adore them. We shower them with affection, we make sure all of their needs are met. The point of the Tik Tok, I think, was that we shouldn’t need to do anything to feel like we have value.
Only, waiting isn’t doing nothing. I’ve been a bit sloppy – waiting isn’t an action as much as it is a pause, one that is often agonizing. Waiting is temporal and impermanent, predicated by whatever one is waiting for. So when we wait, it’s not that we do nothing – we wait. It’s not that we are nothing – it’s rather that our existence for the duration of the wait is constituted by whatever we have attached to that will bring an end to the waiting, which would also be a beginning.
When I broke up with my ex-boyfriend, I checked my phone obsessively. I waited for him to text me – why would he text me? I had broken up with him. Yet, still, I waited. I think one thing about romance, part of what makes it so scary and addicting and insane, is that it defies logic. Why wait? / For love [?].
This morning it occurred to me that the chorus of Stevie Wonder’s song For Once In My Life, provides a generative occasion for thinking through questions related to lying in wait, and what we believe we are waiting for when we wait for love. He sings, “For once, I have something I know won't desert me / I'm not alone anymore (I'm not alone anymore) / For once I can say, "This is mine, you can't take it" / As long as I know I have love, I can make it / For once in my life, I have someone who needs me.” The common refrain by Wonder is “for once.” Foremost, this is a gesture to the notion that we each have a single love of our lives, great love, or a soulmate – one person who completes us, was made for us, is a perfect match/fit/what-have-you for us, specifically. This idea of “once” as it relates to love certainly foments our attachment to it, even when it hurts or leaves us lying in wait, even after we have become revolted by that very love. Its singularity bears being held on to, without our ever asking or being asked at what cost.
Wonder goes on to sing, “I have something I know won’t desert me.” His use of possession and permanence in the context of the “fore once” illustrates the other belief we sustain about love, even when we disprove it over and over again: love, in its truest form, lasts forever. Popular wedding vows affirm that we have another person, “to have and to hold.” The idea of having a person brings us back to the central conflict cited by Dombek: there is a part of others that is inaccessible to us, and a part of ourselves that is inaccessible to others. That isn’t a bad thing! But damn, do we do everything to construct it as such.
Today as I left the supermarket, a young couple was standing in the parking lot with an amplifier and a sign asking for money, for food and rent. The man played All of Me by John Legend on a violin. Unfortunately, I was a waitress in a catering hall at the time of its release, but that did grant me some firsthand insight into the way that people absolutely ate that shit up. The main chorus goes, “Give your all to me / I'll give my all to you” and then, the post-chorus, “'Cause I give you all of me / And you give me all of you, oh-oh.” The normative idea of love as a giving over of yourself, to another person or simply to the wind!, seems to be the thing that marks love as worth waiting for.
The rest of Wonder’s verse similarly upholds the narrative of certain possession; he is thrilled that he can actually say to others that “this is mine, you can’t take it.” I assume “this” refers to the love he feels for this person, this “someone who needs” him. When Wonder says, “As long as I know I have love, I can make it,” he effectively conflates the person he loves with love itself. Presumably, he was talking about love the entire time, drawn from his use of “something,” “this,” and “it.” But his last line makes it clear that this love is attached to a “someone,” someone who needs him. His love for this someone who needs him, perhaps caused by the very fact that they need him, makes him sure that while he has love that’s attached to this person, he can live. He can “make it.”
I’m interested in the idea that love is something we can possess or acquire, as opposed to a way of relating to other people. Sometimes, the love we attach to someone becomes the marker of that person. Another brand of Tik Tok that I’ve encountered so many times on my For You Page is the kind that ascertains that the object of my love was only made special by my love, or that my gaze was what made the person worth loving as opposed to their actually having any qualities that made them loveable. I always felt a bit conflicted about this idea. On the one hand, yeah, I’m sure I can spin a lot of bullshit into a beautiful narrative arc. We all do this all the time, make the ordinary extraordinary. We are our own main characters. On the other hand, that line of thought implicates the act of love as a self-obsessed turning inward, where to love is simply to love one's own gaze and what it does to objects under the gaze. I’m a self admitted shitty-person-apologist. That said, I think that love is a turning outward rather than a turning in – for someone to be made special under your gaze may have more to do with your capacity to identify what is special to you in others, wherein they are special in or outside of the gaze, just maybe/not to you.
What loves are worth waiting for? I bake bread. I love that baking bread takes time, but that its communication is such that I don’t need to lie in wait while it rises. It’s almost like we rise to meet each other when we’re ready. With bread, waiting, crossing time, transforms it into something nourishing. Waiting in romance becomes a kind of hollowing out when it is absent of trust, I think. I’m still learning what is worth waiting for, I suppose.