It is so easy to take for granted, the ease of a relationship that has lasted 106 months. That is almost 9 years, a little less than a quarter of my life. Our existences are so ingrained into each other’s lives that we cannot imagine how else we would exist otherwise.
I have never thought I could be with a person for this long. I just tire of people and things too easily, I tire of myself too. I often feel claustrophobic physically, psychologically, and within my own body and existence. To have another person who is my shadow, light and mirror seems too difficult to bear. In an alternate universe where I am alone, there would be no one to remind myself of my own immaturity and incompleteness, and I could remain in a depressive state for as long as I want without affecting another. But because she is there, I was coerced to learn how to love and care, to grow into someone I never thought I could be. I was so incapable of love, of true connection and intimacy. I still wouldn’t call myself a decent human being now, but at the very least there is a width and depth to me that never existed before.
If you knew us separately, it would have been inconceivable that we would be a couple, much less a couple that has lasted this long. Our personalities just seem antagonistic to each other, like we’re born to provoke each other to oblivion. We started celebrating monthly anniversaries precisely because I didn’t believe we would last, so every completed month together felt rare and precious. Even as we purchased a home together, we laid out the scenarios to handle to co-ownership in case we had to split. There is a minimum occupancy of 5 years in Singapore when we purchase a public flat, and that timeline felt extremely daunting and foreign to us.
Maybe this cognitive dissonance has kept us on our toes, not allowing us to fall into an ease and comfort like other long-term couples. It still exists even till now, in our 106th month together. I cannot comprehend how we can bear each other’s personalities in such close proximity.
She says she is glad I have a body — provoked by tv shows where personalities exist on an interface instead, also considering how often I tell her I wish I do not exist. She tells me if she were me she would find it difficult to exist too. This is the most indicative of her love and understanding towards me among everything else she has said. The way she comprehends my existential distress: only possible because of the mind she has.
I tell her I am glad she is born around me, within the same timeline and the same 50 kilometre-wide country. That our paths could cross, that we were not in existing relationships. Till today despite my ambivalent relationship with life itself, I still find it incredibly lucky that we had met, and that magically we still marvel in each other’s company in spite of our apparent incompatibilities.
Just now during breakfast I asked again, if we imagined us to as two separate individuals we knew in different social circles, would we have thought of us to be possible as a couple? Definitely not. We wouldn’t even have made it as platonic friends. I guess this is part of life that in inexplicable and complex: that we can’t neatly predict the outcome of putting two interacting complex entities together. How we continually respond to each other as we’re both growing as individuals as well as together as a couple, how there must be enough provocation so we continue to inspire the other, but not too much that it becomes an unbridgeable rift. People change, times change, sometimes the environment changes and that makes us change. Can a long-term relationship cope with all the changes and still remain thriving rather than coping?
I don’t think that is a given, and I also don’t believe in forcing a relationship to contain changes that it was never meant to contain. In a natural world, relationships form and end spontaneously. I don’t think there is value to make two people endure each other when they can flourish separately just because of some social norms.
Because of our fundamental beliefs about relationships and that we’re both people who value our individual growth, this relationship always had a precarious quality to it no matter how long we’ve been together or how intertwined we seem to be. We are not people who would compromise the integrity of our selves for the sake of the relationship. So there is a careful dance around each other, and we both innately want to push each other to places we’ve never been. There is a chance that one day she may take off, without me.
I think it is precisely this precariousness that makes us cherish our every day together, and it is this cherishing that makes the relationship thrive. Our relationship sustains, because we are both pessimists.