He didn’t even really love her.
He knew what real love should be like. Real love should be an unstoppable, undeniable, inexpressible feeling; a raw current of emotion between him and the woman he’d love. Love would be the most wonderful thing in the world and he would do anything for it. Yes, he’d even die or kill (if it came to these) for love. The woman he’d love would be his goddess, his soul, his reason to breathe, his own special piece of happiness. Love would make him laugh, jump, radiate joy, charge him with limitless energy and he would treasure it and protect it like nothing else in his life. This is what he imagined love to be.
He could only imagine because in reality, he had never ever been in love. To be precise, he had never been in love like the way he imagined love to be. Sometimes, he had come close to this imagined love but he had known it wasn’t his idea of love. His feelings had never quite matched up to his imaginings.
With her too, he had only come close to this imagined love of his but yet he had told her that he loved her, truly and deeply. Why? Why had he lied to her when he had never meant to deceive her? He now tried to understand this lie.
He first understood that he had created a strange paradox for himself. He could not know if love was actually like his imagined idea of love unless he was in love like he imagined it. There was one more twist - his notion of love could well be blinding him from the worth of his actual feelings.
What was it then that he actually felt for her?
She made him feel wanted. He felt comfortable and secure with her; he didn’t have to be interesting, intelligent or even adult. He liked her smile. He liked her sense of humour because she laughed at most things he thought as funny. He looked on being single as a period of waiting for a partner, so in that sense, his relationship with her meant he wasn’t waiting for anything, he had it already. He liked the fact that she expected him to give in to her whims – he liked giving power to her because it meant he too had power over her. His whims thus also dictated what she’d do. He liked it when she was greatly concerned about how he felt. He liked the way she’d do things for him without cause or need, like making a bowl of soup and or buying him a shirt. He liked the fact that she had adopted a lot of his speech rhythms, tics and quirks and made them hers. She made him feel good about himself.
Of course, all this counted for nothing now. Yes, it had been fantastic. But there was no denying a fact which he had first casually overlooked and then come to dread – she wasn’t it. He knew it on the first day he had seen her, he knew it as fate conspired to throw them together and he knew it now most acutely. She wasn’t the one, the personification of his dream love, his fantasy of feminity. There was a woman he dreamed would be his soul-mate and she wasn’t that woman.
But she had a meant a lot to him. She had become an integral part of his day, his daily ritual. There were parts of the day and the week he could predict in advance what he’d be doing because he and she would be doing their thing, their shared version of a relationship, being a man and woman, holding hands, asking silly questions, sharing the last dollop of ice-cream, saying goodbye with a hug. She had meant a lot to him and this, he was now sure, was the root of his lie.
From one point in their relationship, she had assumed such a central role in his life that he didn’t want to change that. She was safety, she was routine. He didn’t want to lose that. So though he knew she didn’t measure up to his imagined love, he had told her she did. With this lie, he had hoped he would deceive himself into thinking that she was in fact the one. He had hoped this lie would force his heart and his head to reconsider their opinions. Basically, he had hoped that in saying that he loved her, he would actually begin to love her. He saw clearly now that though he had outwardly lied only to her, the bigger lie was the one he had played on himself. He never loved her and he had been a fool for thinking his false words of love would change this reality.
It suddenly hit him now how perfectly self-centered, callous and compassionless he had been and he was being. All through this whole saga of false love, imagined love and real feelings, the only thing he had cared about was himself. His own precious preconceptions, his own precise shade of emotion, his private world of what was, what should be and what cannot be. When things hadn’t turned out like he had hoped they would, he was all set to annul the whole thing, to return the goods due to lack of complete satisfaction. He was, to put it simply, ready to break her heart.
A little part of him told him that he was lucky because it could have been his heart that was about to be broken. But he didn’t feel lucky then. He in fact felt cursed for having a perfect love that existed only in his head. Why couldn’t he be like other people and just fall in love, hold hands, have sex, get married and live happily ever after? What is this love that kills others that stake a claim to its throne, which finishes off other contenders without giving them a chance? What monster had he bred inside his head?
Still, that was how he was and so now it must be like he wanted it to be, because it was better than how he didn’t want it to be. He would tell her he didn’t love her anymore (another lie because he had not loved her at any time), he would say it wasn’t her, it was just him, he had changed. She would look shocked, she would mumble softly, she would hope he was joking, she would reach for his hand in desperation, her tears would roll, she would cry, he would cry too, he would hug her, lead her to a nearby taxi, say sorry for the hundredth time and then say bye and get the fuck out of there. He would do all this and may God forgive him for it.