(At work, surrounded by people that you like, but that are not quite friends and that are not family. Adult topics of discussion. Fast pace. Energetic. Clients. Guard up. Lunch eaten at a desk from take-out containers. Bus rides with strangers. Hunkered down alone with a book.)

(At home, surrounded by children. Laughter and tears. Tantrums and discussions. Unrelenting. Joyful and inescapable. No other adults most days. Just us in a cave. Constantly touched in a taking-way. Touched out, but in need of touching. Talked out, but in need of words that flow in adult-like patterns.)

And at the end of the day we meet. From two different worlds with two different sets of needs. We can understand this to be a temporary thing that will pass. Or we can start to view each other as “too different” and choose to grow apart. We can try and understand the different-type-of-day and the rougher-periods around deadlines and around home-events. We can try to find a balance, or we can choose to feel that it doesn’t really matter.

This is a choice that we are pushed to make, often without understanding or warning. No one talks about the disconnect that happens. There’s “falling in love” and “falling out of love”. There’s the controlling female stereotype and the uncaring distant male. There’s dramatized affairs on both sides where partners escape fro m the person that they used to love that has somehow inexplicably become “bad”.

This is our culture. A culture of separation. Of people that choose to treat each other poorly because they’re pursuing the intense chemical attraction of a person whose faults they haven’t yet learned.

And here we all are, forming families. Thinking that we understand love. Believing that if we are “still in love” all of the things that we go through will somehow not bother us or not matter.

Oh those things will bother us. They’ll bother us deeply.

Maybe we’ll lose our way, not be able to understand how to reconnect. Maybe we’ll stay together as a thing to do, to keep from having to re-start all over again. Maybe we’ll come to resent each other. Maybe we’ll feel unloved, even as we feel we still love.

All of it is choices. Reactions and responses. Actions and decisions. Fifty percent of it is mine.

I cannot see the future.

I have seen people at the end of their lives, where one life extends past another. Where all of the things that made up day to day stresses simply didn’t matter anymore and they were wishing for more time to put to better use.

I’ve seen the end of marriage, where people who could have sat at each others sides at that end of life where nothing really matters anymore, choose to end things because the little things become huge once the hormonal bliss wears thin.

I wish that I had not been raised on the mythical version of love that everyone talks about. The blind and senseless version. I wish that I had been raised understanding how to do these things.

How to get there from here, with him, and with my family. With all the differences of our different day, and all our different wants and needs. While surrounded by all of these things that say love is something fleeting.