Not Now, Honey

BY Esther Anatolitis

Welcome to the prime of my life. So far it’s been pretty amazing, but lately something new has happened: the future.

I’ve travelled the world, collaborated with some wonderful people and produced some fine work. I’ve had all sorts of jobs, I’ve wondered where my next meal is coming from, I’ve relied on friends and I’ve helped friends out when I was able. I’ve spent a lot of time living alone, but I’ve also been in some remarkable relationships – some more ephemeral than emotional, some more instructive than indulgent. I’ve shared intimate pleasures and life-changing passions with people of various backgrounds and ages and genders. I’ve held back where I shouldn’t have, I’ve made mistakes, I’ve done things I can be proud of, I’ve done things I’m ashamed of, I’ve done things. In short, I have glittered. I’ve taken chances, I’ve cast myself out into the open and I’ve said yes to the unknowns.

And now, here in Melbourne at the age of 31, I have taken that greatest of all risks. I have made a life commitment.

I have chosen to spend the rest of my life with one person. To express this commitment in the company of our family and friends. To make a home together, to share stories and meals and dreams and disappointments and ideas and a bed.

How do I reconcile this commitment with the only consistency I have ever known in my life: independence? How is it even possible to conceive of a future with such certainty, that I am able to say yes to every future Esther and all the choices she will make? How is it possible to conceive of the future at all – alone, or with a partner?

Once upon a time I associated permanent relationships with a kind of settling down, a deliberate choice to end one kind of life and start another. The first stage is the adult years of flighty, fun bachelorhood. Transient jobs and projects, short-term plans, broad social circles, devastatingly sexy clothes, big nights and even bigger weekends, casual sex, drunken confessions to best friends. You are the target market for around half of the magazines that make Australia the world’s leading consumer of disposable media. You live the myth that everything is under your control, because nothing is so important that losing it would really matter. Things aren’t settled yet – they’re open, negotiable, possible. Nothing to tie you down.

The second stage, the settling, would happen when my career path was fixed, house bought, clothes neatly folded away, sex predictable. Marriage. Glittering bachelorhood followed by golden domesticity, with whitegoods and home furnishings and respectability. You no longer stand on dark city street corners engaging with curious typography. You are the target market for the other half of the magazines through which Australian housewives power the print media economy. You have dinner parties for an increasingly smaller group of friends and discuss food, wine, perhaps politics but only politely. Perhaps you have a plasma TV – that ultimate relationship decoy, because you and your partner have long since run out of things to talk about.

You recognise my bland little stereotype, don’t you? There’s something there that nags at you already. You do fear the end of your life as you know it. You do fear the end of the adventure. For me, the element of the stereotype that’s the most disconcerting is the move from a dynamic world to a static one. The move from not orienting my life towards a future to locking myself into a predictable future. In fact, both stereotypes lack any engagement whatever with the future.

The more I see and hear and taste of the world, the more the future beckons me to engage. Duration, long-term movements, changes in my body, in my eyes. I’m old enough now to have had acquaintances and friendships that span decades. I’ve seen strong relationships break down. Worse, I’ve seen troublesome relationships stay together and bring out the worst in one another, as though time were infinite and selfhood resurrectable. I’ve seen friends deal with illness and trauma and children and career change and death.

Once I clung to singlehood like an unanchored lifeline. Just like a first love, the first real adult taste of independence took me a long time to own authentically, instead of abstractly. I moved out of home, I floundered but kept up appearances, then before I knew it I was the sustainable, self-contained me that gets by. I was confidently independent, but I associated that confident feeling with the independence itself, as though the only way to be me was to fly solo and move fast.

Independence is the first thing we own for ourselves, the first thing we get to know and enjoy about ourselves as adults. It’s ours to do whatever we like with. It can transform into different clothes and personalities. Like our sexuality, the one thing it can’t do is belong to anyone else, and yet it needs friends, lovers and a world.

One of the hardest things we will ever do in our lifetimes is negotiate those complex zones between independence and dependence, independence and loneliness, independence and commitment. For too long, I associated a sense of self with a staunch, non-negotiable independence. I had an over-protective, under-respected upbringing; my rebellion was to become articulate, facilitative, and creative. For years I believed that there were parts of myself that could permanently be lost to other people. Now, I understand the opposite: there are parts of me I can never know without other people. And following that logic: there are parts of me that don’t exist, that can’t manifest and develop, without the world, without a future, without my partner. These parts of me didn’t have to come into being – they’re not essential, or transcendent, or necessary. There is no part of me that’s necessary. I could just as easily not have been, just as I could just as easily not have met my partner. But now that we’re here, I intend to make the most of things. I want to open my eyes to contingency and understand trust and commitment as having important constitutive roles to play in who I am.

What does it mean to me to live with a sense for the future? It’s opening myself up to change and contingency. Complacency is the danger – it’s not a matter of life with a partner being better than the single life. Nor is a life commitment about a commitment to sameness. Orientation towards a shared future is not about fixing that future or determining it in advance. Here’s where the element of risk comes in. It’s difficult: we don’t have a social vocabulary for complex interrelationships and the subtle ways they change. We have instead a perpetual present, a succession of political polling and consumer confidence indexes, where the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts. We have a contradictory culture of consumer sovereignty against the social taboos of self-pleasure, of corporate excesses versus the shame of personal confidence. To fit that stereotype I should be writing a self-deprecating piece about how I overcame certain embarrassing episodes and now tentatively aspire to do better if I can. Instead, I want to think indulgently about the things that give me strength.

I am no longer afraid of losing myself in a relationship. No longer anxious about boundaries, interstices, uncertainties. No longer avoiding the irreconcilable. I accept that some things have no resolution. My mother will never understand who I am, but that doesn’t mean I am fated to do nothing but pretend a role around her for the rest of my life. I can’t wish my migraines or my endometriosis away, but I can take them seriously as working parameters; structure sets you free. There is something about this me here now, something that didn’t exist until fairly recently. The me who can make a commitment. I can understand limits better, and work comfortably within them. And you know, something has happened to me over the last year. A golden light, a warmth, a new confidence. I want to write manifestos.

In writing about life commitments on a public wall, I have to address the question of sex. How is it that for me, sex with one person better than random play? Ask yourself this instead: how honest have you been with your lovers? There is a pleasure and an intensity that only comes from complete openness to the other, to a trusted other. The best sex you will ever have will be with the one you trust the most. There are so many unknowns. What does it mean to trust? We leap into a void every time we communicate. Warmth, intimacy, physical contact, sex enter that dialectic on their own terms, enfolding ever more delicately with meaning, nuance, memory. There are pleasures I cannot anticipate right now, but I know them. Forget faking orgasms (been there, done that). I am not going to spend the rest of my life faking me, compromising me. I see my future differently now. I see my future.

The conservatives among you will read this as an account of the faith I have that my relationship will last. Dazzled by love? Not so. I don’t have faith. I don’t attach an indeterminate positive of hope to a moral direction. I don’t pretend that an acted-out optimism is going to save me in my darkest hour. What I have is commitment. A determination, an articulated choice, a promise. Something that I can say, feel, transform and enrich with time. Commitment is about being in a place where I can understand that the future is something I will into being, while at the same time I am powerless to control it. The commitment is to change, to otherness, and not to an indefinite extension of the same. Saying yes means embracing contingency, opening myself to otherness.

To be in love with the world is one of my aims in life. It featured in my wedding vows: I promised to do everything in my power to keep my partner happy and healthy and inspired and engaged and in love with the world, for all my life. This doesn’t mean, however, that I become a Stepford Wife. Sometimes I’m not sure at all whether I do love the world. But being in love with it means actively being in a relationship with it, taking it seriously as well as frivolously, reacting and responding and being alternately seduced or frustrated with it. As a project. Like any meaningful relationship, this entails admitting a degree of vulnerability. Is it even possible to be in love with the world, with someone else? This is a question I have yet to resolve – because it’s not possible to resolve, only to live. What challenges me is to become the most me I can possibly be. There is a woman with whom my partner fell in love, and she looks and speaks a certain way now, but her authenticity is mine, and I am not a closed system.

What enriches as I grow older? Political histories and the deep disappointment in seeing past mistakes repeated. A helplessness for the world scale of power play, balanced by a passion for the local, the creative, the gutsy and adventurous. Within my life’s scope, to be in love with the world. The challenge of sharing a complexifying perspective on the world, with an other whom I admire and respect and love. The provocation, the spur of knowing that that shared perspective is impossible; that what is shared is the exchange, the dialogue, the relationship. I love Craig Barrie and I am going to spend the rest of my life with him. We’re going to have children and raise them together. We’re going to make friends and lose friends, we’re going to negotiate the awkward and difficult time of managing our parents’ elderly decline. And one day, our own. Yes.