I’m bad at people sometimes.
A truth you wouldn’t guess when you meet me, but a truth all the same. I spoke at great length about my autism, and about masking, and about how I’ve learned the hard way over all these years on this planet, and this is the reason you probably wouldn’t guess that when you meet me. Being around people absolutely vacuums the energy from my body, from my soul, even when it’s good, even when it’s enriching and wonderful. (To read about this more, check out the April 13th post entitled “Autism and Masking: How I Learned to be Me”)
After any amount of time around people, I need to be completely alone for awhile to recharge, to reset. I need emptiness and softness and silence and low lights and simple routines. I need solitude, more than all things, and I think I always thought this meant I’d need to be entirely alone.
Years I thought this, and years it was reinforced. I never felt like I could fully recharge or reset after spending time around people when I was in a relationship, always feeling like I still was waiting to actually begin recharging. I felt like I was doing something wrong, that the people I was with were wonderful people, beautiful human beings that were loving and caring and generous with their emotions and tenderness, so why wasn’t I feeling the same way I felt when I was alone, why wasn’t I resetting?
Years I thought it’d always feel this way, that perhaps Love was a compromise more than anything else, that I had to give up the thought that I could recharge whilst with someone else. I thought that maybe the answer was finding a relationship that was strong enough that when I needed this emptiness, both of us would be ok with me kind of disappearing for a bit, even if in the same home. I thought it’d be hard, but I thought I could find it.
Years, I waited.
To be honest, I think I convinced myself that’s what love must be, that’s all I thought it could be. Then I met Sarah, then everything I thought I knew was flipped upside down. Then, I saw what Love could mean, what it could come to be defined as, and I saw it in simple terms:
True love feels like solitude.
At least for me, at least for my bizarre brain and my autistic tendencies. True love, is finding the one person that feels as good to me as being alone.
That’s the answer I’d give if asked the question about my relationship with Lady Gregson, that’s what I’d say. I’ve been asked about our connection many times over the years giving interviews, but I guess that I’ve never known how simply I could put it all this time. The strangest thing about our love is that it doesn’t feel like any love I’ve ever known, or love as most depictions of it display, or as most know it—it just feels like solitude, and I wouldn’t trade this feeling for anything.
It’s already a highly polarized subject, love. It already gets crammed down our throats by almost all aspects of pop culture. We’re shown the highly romanticized version, almost entirely. We’re shown it as passion so high it’s almost flammable, as intensity, as a constant give and take of compromise. We’re shown it as high stakes and heartbreaks and bouts of mania and hypomania that either elate or destroy. What if, just what if, real love, true love, is an absence of all that tension?
What if real love is peace, is calm, is quiet, is the serenity we find when we’re alone?
What if most relationships require some degree of social performance? What if we’ve come to expect a certain level of posturing, of masking of its own kind, in order to present our relationships, our loves, as culturally accepted and highly curated little creations?
Maybe true love should feel like the permission you’ve always needed to just BE.
To go a step further, I’ll present the argument for healthy debate here, and it is this: Maybe, if you can’t find a love that feels as good as solitude, you might be better off alone?
I know this challenges the common narrative, that it flies against the idea that we’re supposed to just seek and settle and being together is better than being alone, but I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m asking bigger questions, I’m asking whether or not people are so afraid of being lonely that they stop waiting to find the right kind of love. Perhaps we see loneliness as a failure, instead of seeing the true failure as it is: Settling for less than what we deserve.
Perhaps. I ask further questions to start further conversations. I ask:
How many people here have “settled” for companionship that feels like effort, rather than like ease?
Have you ever been in love with someone, but still felt lonely?
IF being with someone doesn’t feel as good as the way you feel when you’re alone, recharging, resetting, why do we still stay?
I’m not asking these because I know the answer, or that I want to argue that your answers will be wrong, I ask because I am genuinely curious. Is it because of the way love has been displayed to us across so many forms of media? Is it because we learn from relationships in our lives that we see modeling the behavior? What is it that tells us that “enough” is ENOUGH, and that we should not seek MORE?
I speak of what I know, and what I know is truly as simple as I have been saying. I just know that when I’m around people I am emptied out, even the very best interactions with even the very best people, I am emptied out. I need time to reset, to recharge, to replenish what was taken and what I gave away willingly. What I know is that somehow, when I am around Sarah, it not only recharges and resets me, it does so faster than I can when I’m by myself, when I’m truly alone. It’s as though recharging alone puts me on one of those slow-drip trickle chargers to the battery of my soul, but when she’s next to me, I’m plugged into one of those high-speed EV battery chargers that brings you back to 100% in 15 minutes.
I don’t understand it, but I am smart enough to not question it too deeply. It is, it is, it is, and so I shall praise it and feel lucky for it being what it is.
Does your love feel like solitude? Does it feel like something you have to manage, to maintain, or worse, to endure? Tell me of your love, tell me what the strangest thing about love is to you. I would love to hear, as all I know is this love, all I know is this love in contrast to all the other forms I’ve experienced of it. All were wonderful people, all are now in loves of their own that clearly connect on a deeper level, and so I wonder of yours. If you’re comfortable, tell me what your love is, what true love is to you. I would love sincerely love to know.
I just know of one, one only, that feels like being alone, and I asked her to marry me. Love as solitude, love as peace.
This is certainly not what the media promised, but my goodness, it is so much more.
It is so much more, while being so much less.
I will never understand love. I will never stop trying to.
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You’re the only one
that feels like being alone.
Love as solitude.
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