What Happens When this Ends?

What happens when this ends?”

What happens when this ends?”

On a nice winter night in London, with Christmas lights coloring city sidewalks and snow blanketing the streets outside my hotel, the sexiest, loveliest person I have ever known asked me that question just days after declaring she loved me. It was unexpected and propelled my brain immediately into an endless loop of question and possible answers. When I was cognizant enough to move, I did. We had been lying in bed engaged in loving kisses, the kind that might escalate into something more heated, but could just as likely remain languid, loving kisses, that communicated the intense bond we had formed more than words ever could; the kind of kisses that make you feel a connection to someone as something beyond a physical presence and makes atheists believe in things unseen. I didn’t stray too far from her, but since I was unclear what was expected of me, I needed the distance.

It’s an odd sort of question. How does one formulate an answer to a question that seems so unknowable? How does one even begin to frame a response? I wanted to run away from it. It assumes something I was unwilling to think about – endings. It’s also the type of hypothetical I hate, since there is really no answer. We can’t predict the future so there is no knowing what happens when something – anything – ends.

But we like to think we have answers to everything or that if we don’t, we can find them. It’s why we continue to engage in debates about the existence of God. It’s why we are continually reaching beyond our atmosphere to discover the mysteries of space. We want answers. We need answers. And while we are intelligent enough to continue advancing and acquiring knowledge, whether we are gathering it like picking fruit off a single knowledge tree or moving from tree to tree in some sort of metaphorical paradigm shift, we often fall short of understanding the limitations of our knowledge and our capacity to know. We don’t always have the answers and sometimes, we find that difficult to face.

Nowhere is this more evident than in matters of the heart. We don’t know why we fall in love nor can we really explain why some relationships fall apart and others survive. We can try to come up with explanations, but there are simply too many variables. For ten years those socks on the floor do not bother you enough to end things and walk away. Suddenly in year eleven they become a part of the general dysfunction that has become your relationship; an exaggeration of how relationships deteriorate perhaps, but not much of one. In any partnership, at any given time, there may be a hundred things you wish could be different about your partner or your relationship. For years those things may not bother you too much, because someone’s ability to pick their socks up off the floor is not the reason you fell in love in the first place.

And yet, somehow, somewhere down the line in some relationships those small little things along with possible big things become too much and things end. Other relationships never reach that point. We struggle to understand it, why did this relationship survive where others fail? We formulate theories and justifications all in an effort to discover the pattern and thereby the secret to success in love.

We use metaphors to help our explanations. Perhaps relationships are like pots of water over a fire. Resentments build over time like water boiling over. Perhaps the metaphor is more accurately that any pot of boiling water eventually boils away.  We can extend it further and argue that some relationships boil rapidly and fade just as rapidly while others are simmering for so long that the fire goes out before the water evaporates. Or perhaps it is simply the nature of all things with a beginning that they must also have an end. One thing is clear, all relationships do end. Whether it is through mutual agreement, contentious battles, or the demise of one partner, every relationship will end. It is inevitable.

We don’t go into them believing they will however. In fact we are much more optimistic about romantic relationships then any other type of relationship. We do not assume we will have the same friends forever, but we do make those assumptions in considering romantic partners. In some respects it’s understandable that we have a different view of romance. Those relationships are of a very different type. The attachments are intense, the intimacy greater than familial or friendship ties could ever achieve. Besides that we want them to last forever. We reluctantly accept all of our familial ties, even the deadbeat sibling, but we work at romantic relationships because we want them to thrive and survive.

So then how was I to approach this question? She was expecting a response. With moist eyes and a slight tremble discernable on her lips, she was waiting for me to speak. I mumbled some nonsense about not knowing the future in an effort to stall while I figured out what she wanted me to say and what I wanted to say and try to formulate a response that would fall somewhere in between. Still the assumption that it would end irked me and pushed out all other things until I was consumed by it when it should have registered as logical.

If you know something will end, why start at all? That was the question that hung in the air between us. And because I was still struggling with how to respond to something so utterly unanswerable, I let the assumption implied by the question creep in, until there was nothing left but endings.

It’s a logical question and on the surface it makes sense. Things end. Why wouldn’t this? But what she was asking was neither logistical nor logical in nature.  It was a completely emotional question. If we can’t imagine living without the wonderful feeling we had been immersed in and things end, what happens when it ends? What happens when there is no longer an us? The fact was that I didn’t know and could never know what would happen because it is unknowable. However, I was being too linear in my thinking. She had asked the question, but she was not looking for an answer to it. What she craved was reassurance. She wanted me to say it wouldn’t end or at the least that I didn’t want it to. That’s really all one can hope for in relationships that the desire to continue to be engaged in each other remains for as long as one can sustain it, that we continue to know and discover more and more of ourselves and each other as we continue to grow into better and better people. She wanted to know that I didn’t want it to end and that I would continue to love her is if it never would. That was something I could do. I, like her, wanted us to continue and that is what I needed to say. Despite the risk of endings, I wanted this with her. What happens when this ends? We simply start again. In all my over thinking, I had forgotten that I already knew our pattern. Endings were not new to us. Neither were new beginnings.