Love of a lifetime
Barely had I clicked on this new website, lockdownlovestories.com, than my phone rang: it was my love on my doorstep!
Within minutes we were in each other’s arms, and not long after that in bed together, skin to skin, energetically celebrating our reunion. It was four and a half months since we had last touched one another’s body - though over the last 6 weeks or so we had been finding that you can have a lot of bodily and emotional pleasure through communicating online. In this as in other ways our skills have improved with practice!
But there is nothing like the physical presence of the beloved, even when it is more than half a century since we first went to bed together; we both passed “3 score and ten” a few years ago.
My love is in clerical orders. I am a pagan who has lately joined the Society of Friends. We live 400 miles apart, and my love has a spouse, so we don’t get together that often, or as often as I would like. We love within limits, we have agreed.
But we do love.
Lockdown came on suddenly, like the music stopping in a children’s game, and everyone had to look round to grab a place to stop, a chair or place on the floor to sit on. Some were lucky with their companions; some were not. Both my love and I were with people we should have been with: me with my daughter and young children; my love with spouse. But the correct relationships were not necessarily life-enhancing for either of us….
We are in a national and world-wide crisis, why should I expect to escape the general anxiety or stress? I didn’t either expect to, or escape it. In our household we took it in turns to have the symptoms: one of us was usually sleepless, or grumpy, or ill with a minor bug (fortunately not Covid 19 as far as we know, but my son-in-law was off to the local A&E with chest pains on one occasion), or a bad back. Fortunately there was usually one of us who was well and could keep cheerful! We talk from time to time of the importance of gratitude and count our blessings.
For me I had some bouts of depression - real clinical depression such as I had experienced some 30+ years ago, postnatally. Fortunately they did not last long, and I understood why they were happening; but they were devastating while they lasted, and difficult for my daughter in particular. It provoked some difficult conversations between us, which have been quite healing; I am grateful for the clarity and firmness with which she initiated them. But we have a way to go before we can enjoy the good Adult-Adult relationship we would both like to have.
So the loving attention my love gives me, and our online “canoodling”, has been a blessing, an effective anti-depressant, a source of joy and wonder.
How long can this go on? My love’s marriage has been on the line, and they have been having relationship counselling. To end, or to mend? To leave a 7-year marriage is no light thing, especially when you are in holy orders…
In the meantime we love, and hold one another, and sing Tom Lehrer songs, and talk, and walk together in the sunshine when we can, eating ice cream.
Now my lockdown is more or less over, I am living back in my own place and thinking that maybe there is a future which is not lockdown, though its shape is not yet clear. My love is preoccupied with grandchildren from first marriage through the summer, and continuing the counselling on zoom. Decisions are coming; but not yet.
And the economic, political, environmental and health crisis continues; in all my years the world has never felt quite so unstable. I am learning to live in Now and count my blessings: of which enjoying this unconventional love is one of the greatest..
The future is perhaps! But we have a plan to meet again this next weekend.…