Food On the Table
Love Starved. In the opinion of her psychologist, she was starved of love. Being starved of love limited her potential and diminished the beauty of her life.
A professional woman and a mother, discovering she was officially love-starved, made me pretty much hate her husband. Why would he do that? When she says that, in the opinion of her psychologist, she’s always been starved of love, and I begin to wonder if I should be offended.
I’ve spent entire years of my life trying to make sure this woman felt seen, appreciated, acknowledged, and beautiful. The only thing that ever kept me from saying “I love you” was that she didn’t say it first, and, despite what you’ve heard, a fellow knows when he’s making a promise to an empty shell. She wasn’t empty, but her capacity to love me back was becoming less and less visible, still “love starved?”
I am offended.
Some people know how to speak directly to the Great Beast. They prefer him. He’s simpler, more direct, and, under the right circumstances, more gentle.
“My head hurts.” She rests it on my chest. It’s as far up as she can reach.
“head hurt.” The Great Beast replies.
“Umm, humm. It hurts really bad. Carry me?”
“friend. Carry friend.”
“Please?”
“Carry friend where?”
“Upstairs. Upstairs to my bed. I’m not heavy, am I?”
“no. friend tiny.”
And that was that. My original goal was to make her roommate believe I was charming (I’m not), but now she’s captured the Great Beast, and the deal is sealed.
She liked food that was terrible for you. She liked food from one drive-through, but she liked it with food from an entirely different drive-through on the other side of town.
“hungry. friend hungry.”
“Please?”
Now she says she’s always been love-starved.
The trick, I suppose, is that you have to be loved by the right person, and that wasn’t me. It’s hard to tell if you’re the right person. Despite what you’ve heard, women will perform any number of sexual exercises without giving a single fuck about you, so how do you tell?
“I don’t remember any of that?”
“You don’t remember me?”
“I don’t remember that.”
Now I am offended.
When my wife asked me to marry her, I knew she didn’t want to marry me nearly as much as she just wanted to get married, and I was close at hand. She was beautiful, brilliant, talented beyond reason, and loved by everyone. As big as I was, I figured she’d eventually see me, but some people are stubborn.
A gentleman always makes these failures seem like his fault and his fault alone because life isn’t fair to the ladies, and they probably deserve a break in these things, but what do men deserve? She didn’t choose me; she chose getting married. There’s a difference.
Rather than saying “there are two sides to every story, and this is mine,” I made a joke out of it. She was a werewolf. You can’t fault a fella for not being able to make a werewolf happy. The harder it became, the more of my life I let fail and fall apart.
Love starved.
Again, it’s not being loved by the right person that makes one love-starved, even if there’s food on the table. It wasn’t food either of us could eat.
You can’t find love. It has to choose you. You can make yourself available for love. You can bend over backward, carry people upstairs, drive around town buying junk food to prove your love, but unless they choose you, then they will be love-starved, no matter how much food you put on the table.
You don’t need love to survive. I’ve never felt it. Maybe I haven’t been willing to feel it. That’s always a possibility, but either way, I’m very much alive. Am I starving, though?
My friend says that I use my stories as a sort of therapy, and I suppose they do sound like a man lying on a sofa in a psychologist’s office, but that’s a model I use, having once experienced it. I think of my stories like little plays. I’m not excising demons because they’ll still be there when the story is over.
The point of my little plays isn’t to heal me. It’s to make art out of life. It’s how I put food on the table, even if nobody eats it.
