"What if I were Romeo in black jeans?
What if I was Heathcliff, it’s no myth?
What if she’s just looking for
Someone to dance with…"
Why can I not get this mediocre, late 80s, pop phenomenon out of my head? Is it my recent penchant for tight black jeans? The reference to my favourite tragic literary figure? Or am I just lame? Wait a second, I don’t even like dancing. Regardless, Michael Penn’s words and simple acoustic strumming echo in my ears during my solitary walk of shame as I return to my humble abode. Alone. Again. Still. Melodramatic as ever.
It has been almost two years since my current odyssey of singledom began, an odyssey that has been one of unintentional celibacy. With the exception of one evening of misguided lust on a creaky bunkbed at a fishing camp. Odysseus got laid all the time on his journey, what am I doing wrong?
Two weeks after the final death knell had been rung on my decomposed two-year romance, I found myself wondering into bars. Alone. After having downed a Mickey of CC in my depressing residence room, looking for action, as though one more day without sexual contact would undoubtedly result in my spontaneous combustion. The thought of not getting laid after a month was unbearable. At over 20 months, I don’t lust anymore. I don’t even care about sex, really. The thought of having any sensation below my midriff is as unfathomable as the thought of having a third arm. Both seem so beyond reason or possibility that they elude any attempt at comprehension.
Still, I must admit I’m lonely. Sometimes, I think I just miss having a warm body to spoon with at night. But the fact that a rather large stuffed animal with a hot-water-bottle attached to its stomach wouldn’t curb my need indicates that it isn’t just the warm body that I miss. But I cannot resolve what it is that I do miss. Intimacy, I suppose. Having someone obliged to listen to your 2am rants, philosophical dilemmas and recent gastrointestinal issues, besides my own eggshell apartment walls. Or maybe I miss listening to someone else’s 2am rants, philosophical dilemmas and recent gastrointestinal issues. In the quite hours of the night, all I hear is the sound of my neighbour’s snoring, and my rambunctious refrigerator, which makes a lovely gunshotesque sound every time the cooling system shuts off, fucking with my REM. Do I actually miss the sound of his snoring, which kept me up countless nights? The human animal is a strange one. “You don’t know what ya got till it’s gone”, I suppose. Ah, I must admit I feel somewhat redeemed quoting Joni Mitchell after beginning this whole manifesto with Michael Penn.
“What if I were Heathcliff, it’s no myth.”
Wuthering Heights has continued to be my favourite novel since I first read it at the tender age of 15. At the time, I was going through my decade of darkness and anger that I now begrudgingly admit was simply standard teen angst. At the time, I thought it was really who I was: a dark, heavily-made-up demon child who listened to Norwegian Melodic Death Metal…and wore the uniform of a Catholic School Girl. Straight-A genius and model student by day, angry metal-loving maneater by night. At the time, the idea of “love” was a thought that I balked at at every opportunity. I would date boys out of boredom and duty, and dump them as soon as they showed vulnerability, or, God-forbid, drop the “L” word. But something inside me changed when I read Wuthering Heights, a change so profound and lasting that that book has acclaimed the Number 1 spot as my favourite literary work, and will likely retain it for all time. That book shaped the way I would forever view love, relationships, men, and most of all, myself. And, interestingly (at least to me), little of this book’s effect had to do with the actual story, and more to do with history of it’s creator, Emily Brontë
Emily was born in 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the fifth of six children. She first published Wuthering Heights, her only ever novel, in 1847 at the age of 29, and died the next year. As a girl, Emily and her siblings lived in an isolated village where they were separated both socially and intellectually from the local people, and lived mostly in their own made-up fantasy worlds. Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, one of the most devastating tragic romances ever written, based solely on what she imagined true love to be like. Her depiction of the “true love” between Heathcliff and Catherine turns out to be more like mad obsession. But the whole concept of this story being one imagined by a young girl as to how true love really manifests itself sheds a whole different light on the novel, and the characters within it. And as a young, naïve girl of 15, I could identify with this situation. I was quickly becoming a young lady, I was dating dashing young men (read: acne-prone teenagers), and I had no idea what “true love” meant, or how I would recognize it, and I used Wuthering Heights as my basis for comparison. Any relationship in which my partner was not as insanely obsessed with me as Heathcliff was with Catherine was an indication that there was something missing, and our relationship was doomed.
At 19, I finally experienced the sort of mad obsession that I can only imagine resembled this fictitious relationship. It was all-consuming, like some sort of flesh-eating disease, or cancer. Every moment I was apart from my Heathcliff, I felt as if I could not breathe properly. I probably didn’t. I was fully convinced that we were soulmates, that we would be together forever, that he would leave his wife and infant child and run away with me to Nice. Inevitably, our affair ended, and inevitably, not in my favour. The despair I endured in the following weeks was a period I cannot bear to remember. The deperate phonecalls, the endless sobbing, the emo music. But strangely, I do not regret the entire saga. Do I regret allowing a childish affair with a married man 12 years my senior being my first sexual relationship? Definitely, not the best situation (although, I fail to see how getting my hymen broken by some teenage goof in the back of his parents’ Civic is any improvement). More than anything, I regret being at least half to blame for destroying an otherwise blissful marriage, and potentially fucking up a young kid’s life. But at least I’ve experienced the kind of intense, obsessive romance that you only ever see in a fictional context in Victorian-era novels like Wuthering Heights.
Some people would likely argue that that kind of misguided obsession is not “love” at all. I might be one of those people. I am undecided on the whole epistemology of love, thing. The dominant definition of “love” in my books is best expressed by the philosopher, Ronald DeSousa: “love is the acute consciousness of the impossibility of possession.” True love is something one can never have, but can only long for. To have one’s beloved is a paradox. This definitely explains the thrill of the pursuit, and dullness of marriage.
Maybe I have been alone for so long that my destructive, all-consuming affair with my own personal Heathcliff is suddenly seeming devastatingly romantic again. Maybe the idea of having someone so hopelessly obsessed with me, and/or being hopelessly obsessed with someone else has become so foreign to me during my 20 months of romantic abstinence, that I find myself wishing I could find this sort of relationship again to freshen up my memory. Maybe I am forever doomed to look at my past relationships with a “grass is always greener on the other side” mentality.
Maybe I am just looking for someone to dance with…
