It’s Over

A meditation on the moment when you realize you don’t love her any more. 

Your baby doesn’t love you…any more. It’s over, it’s over, it’s o-v-e-r.

Roy Orbison knew. It’s over. A bullet to the heart,  no rhyme or reason. Dum-de-dum, I’m walking on sunshine, CLICK, you’re toast, it’s done. Over. Totally bewildering, out of left field, devastating clinical finality.

After an Olympic coupling, I was waiting outside a tobacconist for her to emerge with the cigarettes she craved. I was in a good mood. I had amazing clarity of perception: it it declared without a shadow of doubt that it was over. Had I known or sensed this before she had gone in? No.

What happened in that short moment of nothingness, the fraction of a second when the traffic noise stopped and I got all lucid? It was the most wide-awake mood swing into epiphany I had ever experienced, like re-possessing myself. I’d just had cappuccino with Jesus, and was strolling on a sea of perfectly calm, rational, heightened awareness, devoid of emotion, free of any sense of loss. In milliseconds, everything crystallised, and I became aware that all feelings for this person had evaporated.

♦◊♦

Self, answer me. How do I feel? Any guilt going spare? Honestly? No. Only the manufactured kind. I’m re-calibrating our emotional attachments. But I am a good guy, I think. Self, do another audit…are you sure? I’m going to let her go if you carry on this way. Sorry, but there’s no residue of guilt right now. You see, the truth just climbed inside, blew the whistle and called time. Oh. I see.


And self was right. No need for further introspection. Then something else happened. Almost as soon as I had shock-processed the first gem of truth, I was visited by another: blessed relief. Seventh heaven, running naked through a tropical Amazonian downpour, refreshing, liberating relief. What’s that all about?

So much relief suggests that not only was the relationship wrong for me, but that I might have been burying or denying this fact for some time. And there are relationships in which we are aware, really, all along.

♦◊♦

The relationship with the tobacco-buying lady was admittedly turbulent, but nothing I was aware of had triggered a negative reaction. Quite the opposite, I was Señor Testosterone coming down from my somersaulting morning pheromones. To digress: I read that after sex, many men don’t do post-coital intimacy because the chemical rebalancing has put them on a face-the-wall downer inspiring endless don’t-you-love-me any-mores. A bit warped—just when women feel their most sharing, men feel their most antisocial.

But no, this wasn’t it.

My inner monologue intrigued me. I realized I had only been biding time like a maverick general undermining my front line troop positions. What triggers this conversation to take control? It must have been instinct. I’ve come to realise, finally, that instinct is the holy grail of relationships. Having it, being aware of it, trusting it and using it. If it is hiding in a closet, buried under baggage or held to ransom by denial, then the it’s over punch in the solar plexus comes as a shock.

If we are in touch with our instincts, when exactly do we decide it’s over? A relationship is elastic (relationship elasticity, as John Maynard Freud might have said), but we enter into an implicit contract, just as we ‘suspend our disbelief’ to enjoy a film. A bad script brings us back to earth with a bump, and if the main character’s acting is atrocious,we simply don’t believe in it any more, and the relationship story runs out of steam—it’s over. Yet in real life, should it not be just a little bit more predictable, informed by experience?

Do we subconsciously calculate relationship value in our choice of partners, starting with a full score card, points deducted for misdemeanors? Below a certain number, does she automatically get benched? All the things you said you wouldn’t penalise (Mcdonald’s addiction, dribbling when eating, tedious over-use of ‘like, do you you know what I mean, like ‘ as speech-pattern glue…) actually did cost points, and the subconscious kept the tab. The card is as empty as hers would be if you committed a serious enough offense—infidelity, say. Or murder. Or dipping too deep into your repertoire of ‘What’s my perversion?’ surprises.

This is the game we all play, on both sides of the gender gap. But what sets the points threshold of ‘over’, of the other’s irredeemable disgrace? They all count: personal values, integrity, decency,tendencies of judgement and the oh, jeez I’ve been here before moments. But however wise we might become about our own scoring system, Cupid still has a mischievous tendency to pair us with the wrong partner. We still repeat our behaviour patterns and are still susceptible to being dumped out of the blue, to hear the immortal words, “No, it’s not you, it’s me…” because in some unperceived way, we emptied her score card. And as so often happens through the bamboozling relationship mediator of online dating, you won’t know why it’s over at the precise moment when you think it’s on.

Inescapably, you don’t love her any more. Stretching the elastic won’t help.

Photo by дзроман