The Jury is Out

“Is everything OK?”, said the foreign waiter in a tone that mortified me. I wasn’t in the city. I wasn’t in the suburbs either. I was somewhere in between that was so undefined it unsettled me. I was sitting in a wicker chair: fragile and unstable, and ready to break at any given moment.

“Yes, everything’s perfect”, I said, grateful that I could at least convince a perfect stranger it was the truth. Truth was, everything was far from perfect. I was in romantic limbo, the place in a relationship where you realise you can’t go on but neither can you terminate.

I had no clue what I was going to do, but this week like no other, my body had announced to me that I was going to arrive at a decision. Such decisions can be pondered over for weeks, months, even years, but sometimes, in love, there are emergencies of the heart.

The Other Party, I was sure, was confused about why I needed, right now, to make a change. I was confused too, but sometimes, you just have to trust your gut feeling. Sometimes, your mind cannot rationalise a decision.

They say that in lifetime you have just two great loves. How do you define a great love, I had to wonder. Is it a love that feels comfortable and safe, or is it a love that grips you, insists that you take part, and makes you feel every feeling you’d never before experienced, both positive and negative. If it was the latter, I guessed that I was in the midst of experiencing the Great Love of the 21st Century.

Ten minutes later, my coffee arrived. It was 8:30am and in this part of town, no-one was sitting-in. I should be grateful that I have the time to ponder my life in such depth, I decided.

“Sometimes you just need a break, right?”, I questioned of my 19-going-on-30 friend Lora some hours later, waiting for our beers to arrive. “Sweetheart, you are a single man in a relationship. It’s not fair to anyone”, she announced, swinging her Prada, so enormous it could have been luggage, I believed.

I was at risk of becoming fatally dissatisfied through ignorance of the situation and yet, acknowledging it would create deep unhappiness for the Other Party. It was true: the ball was in my court, and for once, I had no idea what to do with it. Maybe Lora was right, maybe I was out of the game already in my own mind, and so there was no decision to make.

And then I wondered, had I consulted too many opinions on the subject? Had I become so acutely aware of the opinions of others that I had completely lost the ability to acknowledge my own? Would my relationship make or break on the basis of a survey?

It is a terrible thing to find yourself in a position where other peoples feelings will dictate your actions. It is a sign of weakness, I told myself. Maybe, it was goodness at one point, but not anymore. I had been worn down. Those who exercise goodness and a Mr Nice Guy attitude too liberally will be taken advantage of by some characters that crop up in life, and the fault is their own.

In friendships it happens all the time, but at least in friendships the Sex Haze doesn’t exist. You can make a logical decision and usually it’s “Bye-bye Polly” without a parting kiss. With relationships of the romantic variety, it’s more complicated.

It’s a great thing to be Mr Nice Guy when you’re telling your sweetheart that you know no-one in the world that is greater than them, and you mean it too. It’s not such a great thing however, when you find yourself trapped and feeling like you’re being suffocated by an 800-count Egyptian cotton duvet cover.

You are trapped because by leaving--there are several comic exit lines to do this--you are causing potentially harmful damage to the Other Party. By staying, you are causing potentially harmful damage to yourself. It’s all sort of, “I love you sweetheart, but I love me more”.

Three days, two clubs and one party later, I decided that you can listen to the defendant, and you can listen to your friends--the jury you rely on to produce a rational and impartial verdict--but at the end of the day, you are the best judge of your own fate. “The jury is out”, I said aloud, “but times-a-ticking”.