Fragments of Feeling

A married friend, whose husband had months before asked for their divorce, once told me that she had never felt a sense of intimacy with him. But she still loved him.

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Is it wrong to write about someone else's feelings? I don't know.

-Feelings are real, her words.

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From encounters, I have learned that other cultures have a different dynamics of emotion from my own. An example at the broader level: shame is more prominent than guilt as an emotional driver in many Japanese cultures. But even entering the space of another family, one can feel sometimes the push and pull of repeated emotional positions, forces that have shaped the personalities of the family for years.

This is most evidently true for the very young, who depend day-by-day on their parent's or carer's favour. Each of us is born with some emotions more than others; but the particular emotions we have are shaped interpersonally.

If I write of someone else's feelings, I also write about how other's feelings have shaped myself and how my feelings have shaped others.

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I encountered a Czech couple in a hostel in Budapest once.

After a brief discussion with the Czech man, his partner said "I thought you weren't going to speak English on this trip." I had violated an unspoken rule.

I can't remember the context, but ironically I was telling him about Wordsworth - how in The Prelude, Wordsworth had been alienated by the city state and saw reconnecting with nature as the means to heal the violations of reason, and in particular, the kind of city violence unleashed by the French Revolution. This violence had caused a severe crisis in Wordsworth's personal life.

The Czech man replied that there were few such refuges, far from the urbanised world, in Europe anymore.

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I love cities. When I was young, I could not connect with Seamus Heaney and other nature poets I associated with the dominant poetic style of the 1990s. I have changed; but when the English countryside votes Brexit, tears rise in my heart.

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I don't know if I have ever met a person who accepts everyone. There are lines that cannot be crossed. 

If this is true for everyone, then we can say that each of us operates an unspoken set of rules. We have personal laws. We become angry or panic or react negatively when our laws are broken. 

Emily wanted a fairly predictable life. This summer I couldn't, or didn't, offer it to her.

Foolishly I presumed she would put up with the volatility.

Of the powers outside our control, there were three chief catalysts: the weather, my work and a seething anti-immigrant popular mood. May and June were the most miserable months of the year, weather-wise. My room flooded five times. My work hours went up and down like a yo-yo (mostly they were up). Then Brexit, and the appointment of Theresa May by default, our least favourite politician whose immigration policies had mostly kept us apart for more than ten months.

There were other big problems too, but I would rather not get into them. Suffice to say, the story I had been telling her and she had been telling herself about how moving to London would be better for her manifestly broke down when confronted with reality (a reality that could hardly be more badly timed).

I kept trying to make Emily happier, despite what was going wrong, by doing fun things on the weekend, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. But in doing so, I kept falling behind on practical decisions - wedding-related, or other aspects of personal life. And in between all this, I lost sight of the intimate side of our relationship, the world between us that had kept us together for five years.

That was the most frightening thing  - the sense that the various pressures around me had removed an essential part of myself, and which Emily would at one point confirm was the person she had fallen in love with. Then in July the most frightening thing was the breakup of our relationship.

Emily was faced with moving away from her country, her friends and her family. That's a lot of emotional bonds, and in retrospect I completely ignored this huge part of her emotional reality. I reasoned she was an intelligent woman who had made an intelligent decision and was blind to the fact that she was losing a lot of what made her feel great.

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Love needs vision to succeed.

A lover needs to recognise their lover's emotional realities, and even maintain some of their lover's fictions, or lose the loving bond. A marriage is no mere contract; a good husband or wife keeps their spouse's love in play and prioritises their lover's emotions. And, in different ways, I and Emily gave up before we got there.

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I came to emphasise in my mind that human beings have emotional realities, not easily sensible from their physical selves, while tutoring Keats' narrative poems. Keats plays tricks with both his characters and his reader's emotions in such a way as to reveal 

how the emotional reality of a person can be massively at variance with how physically they appear or seem; 

how interdependent our perceptions are with our emotions; and 

how manipulable our emotions and perceptions are. 

For our emotions are full of fictions - even, perhaps especially, the person who considers themself a 'realist'.

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The memory of Emily's love is falling away now. Mostly the past six months have been kind to me - family and friends gathered to support me, a few weeks after our breakup I went on a delightful holiday, then came back and joined a team at work that I greatly enjoy working with, I've been to lots of fun events - parties, gigs, plays, etc.

When I remember the source of my loneliness, it can bring sudden pangs of grief, but these seem to happen less and less now. I'm writing this piece partly so that I have something to look back at, to remember not to forget next time: -  that I only see fragments of feelings in others, which especially needs to be remembered for those I are most close to.

I feel ready to move on.