When I was six I came down with a case of second degree chicken pox. It was so bad that I had pox inside my throat and under my eyelids. My hippie mom, who made our own yogurt and bread and would never let me watch Three’s Company because it was sexist, took great pity on me and bought me the Malibu Skipper doll I had always wanted. Okay so she had no boobs like Barbie, but she had lovely cornsilk hair and a great tan line from her tiny bikini. And one super cool thing about her was that she came in a carrying case, with a spot that she snugged into just perfectly. It was a Skipper-shaped-box, so to speak.
I hate to say it but Skipper aged. Her bendable feet got a little wonky and her tan peeled, like a bad, off color sunburn. I got older too and got other Barbies as gifts. But never, NEVER, would I put another Barbie in Skipper’s carrying case. That was frankly just wrong. It was for Skipper and nobody else could fill it, never ever. She would go to the landfill in that box after my death, as far as I was concerned.
I came to realize the world of romance worked like this too. When I got my first long awaited boyfriend at the ripe age of 17, my heart molded to his shape and I was positive there could be no other to ever fill that space. After he exited, no one else got in, not for a long time. My heart had to soften into a flexible rubberiness first before someone else could fill it. And they did, monogamously, serially, until I started dating my ex-husband at the age of 22.
There was a pretty big thinking flaw in all of this— this idea was fatal to my marriage and it afflicts much of modern romance. This idea that I clung to—of the carrying case for my childhood idol— does not in reality work when applied to true love. This is a sweet, childish, ultimately destructive fantasy. Your heart is not space limited. Neither is his nor hers. And love and sex, companionship, friendship, desire, and lust—those are all intersecting concepts that coexist in a network between our hearts and brains. We are not limited to love and desire one person at a time. Unfortunate? Maybe.
More unfortunate I think is the delusion that this is so. This thinking limited me to a belief that my “monogamous” love was indestructible. The betrayal of an affair in a marriage cuts no matter which way you twist it, but when you thought your husband had a heart molded to fit only you and you only forever, the betrayal cuts to the foundation of your beliefs.
So call me jaded. Let’s be jaded together! Not because misery loves company (it does— but I am not miserable). Far from it! I am wiser now and I want us all to be a little of that. A little wiser. If we know we have hearts rather than heart-shaped boxes, we know that our relationship can be vulnerable and we work to protect it. What does that mean? It depends on the relationship and what is desired within it.
It also means, for myself, as a single person, that I don’t try to shove another peg in the space left by a breakup. In Spanish there is an idiom: “Clavo que saca otro clavo.” Or, loosely, one nail pulls out another. Trust me, it doesn’t. Our dreams inform us that sometimes, the heart holds on. Some stay, some go, some loves change into fondness or friendship or nostalgia, some turn to yearning, some seemingly evaporate. Regardless, your heart is not a phone booth or a runway. If only it were that simple and easy. “Room for one” would give us so much clarity. We could just yell ‘Next!’ as soon as we were ready, and if our partner strayed, well that would be their ‘next!’ and we wouldn’t need to ask any of the complicated questions about love, sex, and desire that follow.
I just went through a break up. I’m reminding myself, “you have infinite capacity to love.” Even wounded, it is still there.
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