Pouring Hearts
23.54
Dinnertime was one of the few pockets in my day I had with my parents. One evening, my dad had made water spinach, long hot pepper beef, 香干炒肉 (smoked bean curd), and 苦瓜 (bitter melon) for dinner. “Try the bitter melon, it tastes great”, my dad insisted. My dad wolfed down his bowl of rice. I glanced at my mom carefully picking dishes into her bowl. I clearly had gotten my eating habits from one and carefulness from the other. We ate in the comfort of silence, broken only by the tapping of chopsticks against ceramic. This is still the dinner setting most familiar to me.
A few weeks later, my dad and I were strolling down a path in our wooded neighborhood. My parents had just fought. After the dinner, my mom went on a tirade, criticizing everything from my dad’s dinners to his role in their marriage and the household. The tension throughout the house was palpable. They fought in a way I hadn’t seen in some time. I wanted to ask him about it on the walk, but I couldn’t find the words. A language barrier always made communicating with my dad difficult, but there was another invisible force at play: I didn’t know how to talk about intimate topics with him. So we walked, as we often ate, in comfortable silence.
Of all the things I’ve learned from my parents growing up, intimacy and affection don’t naturally come to mind. I didn’t grow up in an affectionate household. “I love you” only came from TV shows I watched and books I didn’t read. Hugs were reserved for long goodbyes. Once my family was dropping off my mom at the airport, and my dad went over to hug my mom goodbye. My sister and I jokingly shot back in shock as if he had tackled her instead. Although I knew this wasn’t normal, I never questioned the sincerity of my parents’ love for each other and for my sister and me. I was aware that we were different from my friends’ households, but so too were the scents of our home and the dinners we ate. You learn what is visible growing up. Observational learning is why I eat too fast and why some words come too slow.
In retrospect, how this would translate into my romantic life shouldn’t have surprised me. I felt as if I had failed to love in the past, or at least the kind predicated on verbal and outward affection. I realized how I would avoid depending on others, withdraw from difficult situations, or suppress feeling to be accomodating. I noticed how I put some things on pedestals for no good reason. I preoccupied myself with the fear of regretting words said when the words unsaid were more pernicious. The irony for those who struggle with affection is that words carry too little meaning when received and too much meaning when given. Most people cope in one of two ways: either preoccupy yourself with work, hobbies, friends, hookups until you go numb, or soul-search yourself toward an unattainable nirvana. I landed somewhere in-between. It was easiest to blame my environment growing up and move on.
But, on that walk with my dad, I eventually broke the silence. I wanted to try, language barrier and all, to understand why we express the receive love the way we do in this family. I asked him about their marriage, and he told me about how they were introduced to one another and started dating. He told me about how they both received and gave love differently, yet were able to mold together tolerance, patience, and directness. He told me how he wrote her an apology note and woke up an extra hour before she did at sunrise to prepare a lunch for her. Our conversation was as mundane as it was romantic. It was a lesson on love and intimacy in of the last places I expected. A flower blossoming in the snowy path.
My time at home had been the longest period I’ve spent with my parents in five years, and five formative years at that. Over dinners, walks, and chats with my parents, I paid more attention to the invisible forces that tied my family together—food, sacrifice, shared presence, and other less apparent things. It gave me a window to see the good, bad, and ugly parts of my character that I’ve learned growing up. I’m learning to appreciate these learnings rather than blame them.
Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.
Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
I long held onto a narrow view of intimacy—that it only came from the exceptionally romantic. This intimacy lives along the curves down their spine, the coarseness of their hair, the contours of their face, the mixture of pheromones and perfumes that comprise their scent, or the affirmation of their words. But, intimacy is also fantasy turned into thousands of tedious things. This form lives in the little routines and beliefs. How do you spend your mornings? What values do you quietly hold? Intimacy flows through shared histories, memories, and spaces where propriety fades away. It exists between you and your friend spewing insecurities and nonsense into the void on a late-night drive, between you and the bitter melon your dad cooked in your rice bowl, and between you and yourself in times of solitude.
There is still so much I will learn about intimacy, just ask… never mind, but expanding its definition is a start. Find in someone else not only euphoria but also stillness. Seek those with whom time moves so fast, it is almost still. And when that feels foolish, ask what we are doing with time but trying to find something worth stopping it over? Some will choose to avoid this stillness, but others will choose to include you in the minutia of their world. Others will know that in a world of infinite choices, intimacy comes from those we choose to commit to time and time again.
