Every Relationship Is a Trial

After the exam I always tell my students the same thing: look not at your grade, look at your paper. Most do not look. The grade has come out; for them the matter is closed. Yet the grade is only the result; the lesson is in the paper; in which question, why, and how. The student who does not look at his paper gets the same question wrong again in the next exam. The surprising thing is not his error; it is his being surprised anew every time. As for the student who looks at his paper, you can never again catch him on that question; even if his grade is low, the one who came out of that exam with the profit is he.

In relationships I see the same scene. The relationship ends, the grade is announced; “it did not work”; and the paper is not opened again. While the pain is fresh one cannot look, I understand; the right of mourning I would withhold from no one. But the pain passes, and the paper still is not opened. Then someone new comes; the question is asked a little differently, the answer is given the same, the result comes out the same. At the third repetition the person begins to blame no longer the question but the exam itself: “They are all the same.” “Love is not for me.” “I no longer believe.”

Yet a single sentence breaks this cycle: every relationship is a trial. I do not say this to belittle the relationship; on the contrary, I say it to give back its honor. No one can know their partner on paper. Which of your expectations is real, which memorized; what of your own reality is sound, what is varnish; none of these is understood at the desk. The stroke is studied from the book, but swimming is learned in the water. The relationship is that water itself. Is preparation needed? Certainly; the one who enters the water without knowing himself cannot know the wave either. But preparation does not take the water’s place. At some point one enters, and enter one must.

I hear the objection: “If every relationship is a trial, are people specimens? Shall we try and try and discard?” No; the trial is not a license for insincerity. The trial too has a morality: one enters honestly, lives honestly, and if it is to end, ends it honestly; without stalling, without dragging, without keeping in reserve. To say “trial” is not to say “I do not take it seriously”; it is to say “I do not know the result in advance.” No one knows anyway; those who gave their word did not know, nor those who put on the ring. The only difference is here: the person who admits not knowing lives attentively, records what he sees, notices early that he was wrong. The one who does not admit it enters with “this is certainly the one,” and when he is wrong, what is in his hand is not data but wreckage. Do not take offense at the word trial; what deserves offense is trying without even knowing that one tries.

Every trial leaves data as well; about the one across from you and about you. Some relationships introduce people to you: where your patience ends, which beauty blinds you, which flaw is larger than it looks. Some relationships; to my mind the more precious; introduce you to you. You supposed you were not jealous; you were not so. You kept saying “silence bores me”; it turns out what tired you was noise. You supposed you could not stay alone; it turns out what you could not bear was not solitude but the wrong crowd. These findings are not reached from a book; they are reached only by living. Let me go further still: some relationships come not that you may find your partner, but that you may be shown to yourself. That its end did not come does not make it wasted; it is like a blood test; though the result did not come out as you wished, the report is full. The one who does not read the report, no one can help.

The real mistake is made not in the trial but after the trial: instead of drawing the lesson, sulking at love. Sulking has two sentences; both you have heard much, perhaps have said. One is “they are all the same”; with one person’s file, a wholesale verdict cut to an entire sex, sometimes to all humanity. With a single witness a verdict of this breadth is not given; no conscience puts its signature to it. It does not; yet when the matter comes to our own heart, we sign at once. The circle too joins this chorus most of the time; you know the consolation council convened on the morrow of the parting. There, to still the pain, always the same medicine is given: “They are all like that anyway.” The medicine does good in the short term; when the blame is scattered, the pain lightens; but in the long term it is poison; while taking the pain it locks the door too. The good friend is the one who in that council does not say “they are all the same”; the one who says “sit, let us look at the paper.” He is rarely found; when you find him, know his worth. The other sentence is quieter: “I cannot manage this work.” This too is a life sentence cut to oneself; from a single trial, or say from three. The two are in truth the same mistake: from a handful of data to derive a universal law. The one who draws the lesson asks an altogether different question: Which of my expectations did this relationship show me to be false? Which of my realities to have gone uncared-for? The one who answers this question does not live the same story again. The one who sulks lives the same story again under another name. The strangest side of sulking is this: it does not protect a person, it only binds his eyes; and the person with bound eyes supposes himself protected.

For this reason the parting must be taken out of the language of catastrophe. Most partings are not two people’s “ruining” of each other; they are two truths’ coming to the light of day and its being seen that they do not agree. At times there is not even a guilty party in the middle; two good people may not be each other’s good. Sorrow of course is lawful; the feeling was real, after it mourning is kept, and should be. But the term of mourning and the term of the verdict are separate things. Sorrow passes; if “never again” remains, the true loss is lived that day. The trial goes to waste that day; not the day it ended; for its data is thrown to the bin that day. Even the most painfully ended relationship has left you something; if you did not take it, that is no longer its not giving but your not taking.

“And if it holds?” A fine question; for when it holds too the trial does not end, it changes shape. Love is not a machine that works of its own accord; it continues, but it wants maintenance. For both people change: the person with whom you struck harmony years ago is today another person; and so are you. Harmony is not an adjustment made once and finished but a maintenance repeated at intervals: the maintenance of listening, the maintenance of asking, the maintenance of time. Let me say it concretely, that it not hang in the air: to await the answer of the question “how were you today” by truly listening. An evening on which the telephone does not sit down at the table. To ask the person you have supposed you knew for years a question as if you did not know; for truly you do not know, they have changed. Small repetitions are these; without show, their song is not written. To relationships that last long, from outside, “the lucky ones” is said; looking from close, in most of them you see not luck but maintenance never skipped. My observation is this; let him who wishes to believe in luck believe still; but let him not skip the maintenance either.

Let me say it from the start, that it not be misunderstood: trying does not guarantee you the right person. Life does not love formulas; love loves them not at all. But there is one thing that trying, looking, drawing the lesson does guarantee: not being lost in the wrong. The person who enters knowing himself can be wrong; he is wrong, too. But he is not lost; at the worst probability he comes out with a new knowledge of himself, and with that knowledge he is not wrong again in the same place. What those who sulk at love lose is exactly this: not the relationship they were wrong in, but what that relationship would teach. The relationship had ended anyway; the lesson was still standing. They closed the door on both at once. And there is this too: tomorrow someone will come out before you; they will come, life works so; and will tell you themselves. With which ear will you listen to them? If you listen with the last trial’s anger, that person begins to pay the former one’s debt before ever opening their mouth; they are innocent, but guilty in advance. If you listen with its lesson, you know both what you seek and what you ask; and that person will have been listened to as themselves. The difference between the two can be the difference of an entire lifetime.

In sum: the parting is not the place where love is proven wrong, but the place where the address was proven wrong. Do not sulk at love; correct the address.

And my question is this; answer without letting it slip: did you open the paper of your last ended trial; or did you see the grade and close the file?