Madness

Can you love like you did at sixteen? Or even eighteen?

I remember watching an episode of Ally Mcbeal (yes i know, just let it go for now) where she talks about how as men grow older, past their teens and into real adulthood, they lose the ability to love passionately, and uninhibitedly. Everything they feel is more mature and tempered with reality and responsibility. I've nevr been sure about how accurate this theory is, but I do know from my own experiences, that I dont feel as all consumingly as I did when I was sixteen.

There are of course problems with feeling so intensely, but honestly, who doesnt want to be loved like that? Now, in my early twenties, Im madly in love with someone who is in his early thirties. I have a much better grasp on my own emotions, and I'm no longer as psychotic as I used to be. But, neither is he. And as he has had so much more practise at being in control, I cant help but feel a vague longing for the madness that I remember from the love of other men who were still in the middle of growing up.

More importantly, and certainly more distressingly, I feel incredibly left out when it comes to his youth. when he speaks to me of women he loved when he was eighteen, women who are still a part of his life, women who he is still very fond of, I see in him the madness that I know is missing from his feelings for me. I dont think he is in love with anyone else, and I know that the reasons his previous relationships didnt work out were solid, and he has no desire to be with anyone but me, But bloody hell I wish he could love me like he loved them.

Its like there was this whole other man, who I will never know, never get to enjoy, never get to hate and never be loved by, who exists in the past tense but continues to haunt the present. We are so fatally stable, so committed to each other at such a fundamental level that in some sense there is no excitement left between us. The madness I have had with men before him, both the insane joy and the insane grief have become duller, less extreme, pastel.

He appears to be beyond such frivolity, but I know I am not. I want him as the man he was before he became mine, and I want to feel in the bright colours I used to. I can find it somewhere else obviously, but in truth I want him. I want to hvae some part to play in who is going to become, to give him the memories of insanity that we both have with other people.

I want, to put it simply to be drowning in the madness once again.