Contact has been made

I’ve often said to friends that with Jen’s death I lost 90% of my adult company. The truth is worse than that, for even if I could replace that time in aggregate between my friends, nothing would come close to the depth and continuity of my conversations with Jen. She knew every important memory of my first twenty five years, and she shared the next seventeen – so many special moments of which I am now the only witness. In a typical working day I’d find time to ring her at least once and usually twice to chat about what was happening. That would continue on and off from when I arrived home, until a last precious chat in bed before going to sleep. The purpose of those conversations ranged widely – information, analysis, argument, letting off steam, reassurance, problem-solving, decision-making and so on. 

The last three years has been a slow adjustment to a new kind of single life, building up a stronger network of friendship and support.  I don’t yet find all of those dimensions of conversation now in friendship, and wonder if I ever will. But being involved in a new relationship this year briefly brought back that experience of intense contact with another person. Apart from the sheer volume of communication, there was the deeper sense of being a high priority to someone else, not only in responsiveness, but in a commitment to remember and be interested in the details of each other’s lives. A new and unsuspected world opened up, the richness of a person’s whole life, their history and memory, their fears and failures, their hopes and plans. As Ted Hughes writes in a poem about meeting Sylvia Plath (echoing John Donne) - “You were a new world. My new world. So this is America, I marvelled. Beautiful, beautiful America.”   

Then there’s the dark side. The title of the blog is the catchphrase from a second-rate 1970’s  Dr Who series  (The Invisible Enemy) – as characters are infected and controlled by the alien virus they say ‘Contact has been made’.  The very power of that experience of communion with another person can feed the craziness that lurks around relationships – whether the metaphor is illness, obsession, madness or addiction.  The meeting of that need for connection can influence us to accept poor treatment, to try to prolong doomed relationships, to ignore the concerns of our friends. In Geoffrey David Roberts’ book “Shantaram” there are two characters in what he characterizes as a “lifeboat” relationship. One person is continually sacrificing things that matter to them in order to keep the other person happy, throwing things overboard to keep the lifeboat afloat, until they lose respect for themselves. I remember when I read that passage years ago, I suddenly saw parts of my life differently. 

My briefly renewed experience of the intimacy of communication could hardly compare to my long years with Jen, but it rekindled my dissatisfaction with singleness, and made the readjustment back more problematic. For all the benefits of the single life, to me it doesn’t hold a candle to the intimacy of a good marriage – while still being much preferable to the eventual destruction wrought by a dysfunctional relationship. But to live in the present, I’ve had to rebuild the time I put into friendships.  I’ve also come back to the recognition that I am loved now by many people, and I don’t have to satisfy most of that desire for contact in one person.  

In contrast to that metaphor of madness, I’d see a more fundamental reality behind this desire for connection. Augustine writes in the opening section of the ‘Confessions’ “you have made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you”. The deepest experiences of contact, whether in marriage or singleness, are only an echo of something much greater, not exclusive as romance is, but sure and lasting – the answer to the cry of our heart.