Sunday, May 18, 2008

Commitment

This week, the State of California made history by overturning the ban on same-sex marriages.  Across the nation, gay and lesbian couples celebrated the news and online GLBT social networking sites were abuzz with what that might mean in their own states, while same-sex celebrity couples made plans for their own nuptials.  

I was certainly glad to hear the news, but it didn't create the groundswell of hope and longing in me that it did for many of my friends.  

At first thought, this was a puzzler, since I am pro-justaboutanythingGLBT-related.  But as I sat this morning drinking my coffee on the front porch of the house I share with two darling corgis and no other humans, it came to me that I am not a joiner.  I am a dropper-inner.  And while I love being in the company of good friends and enjoy a wide variety of interests and hobbies and addictions and fads, in truth I am a very social loner.  

In my life, I have enjoyed the company and soul-connection of a handful of very quality women. Some for a few months, and a few for several years.  To my mind, each of those women brought a vision or glimmer into my life and my world that was lacking or unrealized.  And while we might mutually cite a million reasons for why we came together in the first place, and a million more for why we eventually parted, I am certain that the prime factor resides within me.    

And while I continue to seek out my soulmate - at least in theory - in practice, I am quite comfortable living my solitary life, enjoying those chance connections with like-minded women when they occur, reveling in the passion and shared bliss that we create for that moment in time, and mourning the loss when it inevitably runs its course.  Hindsight may or may not always be 20-20!

Experience has taught me that I am not a good cohabitor.  Relationships are 75% hard work and compromise, and for the last 15 years, I have equated compromise with 'settling.'    When I review the qualities that stood my first relationship in good stead for 13 years, I can only attribute it to dumb luck. 

Absent that first love, I really don't have a reliable relationship model to copy or emulate.

In the poet's heart that beats in my breast, I want to believe that every choice in a partner is inherently good, if both are willing to work and make good decisions and informed compromises.  I can see that relationship in my mind's eye, off in the distance.  It is so clear and real I can almost taste it.  But I have lost the roadmap.   

So while I applaud and celebrate the news that sprung from the "activist judges" in California, I do so from the cheap seats high in the far reaches of the stadium -- not the box seats that lead onto the playing field.

-- HeartSleeve