I went to a wedding last Sunday. That’s what I kept on telling people, because it was the word that best suited the occasion - a couple inviting friends and family over to celebrate tying the knot.
There wasn’t a cleric or official in sight, though. It was a lovely summer’s day, bit cloudy, but nice and warm. They held it in their beautiful garden. Parents and step-parents and siblings and step-siblings and neighbours and cousins and friends all gathered together, in very good humour. It was a generous group, I didn’t know anyone there apart from the hosts, but I didn’t feel left out. Toddlers running around at knee-height, glasses of bubbly and bite-sized delicious things being handed out by funky pleasant caterers, who looked like out of work character actors. A typical, informal, friendly, English summer garden party, in a way.
The very ordinariness of it was what was delightful, and my friend commented on it in his speech, pointing to the children milling around and saying how wonderful it was that when they grow up, they will not consider it strange to see two men get married. To be accurate, it wasn’t a marriage, but a party to celebrate the registration of their civil partnership, which had been a couple of weeks earlier in a registry office in London. But it was also to celebrate 15 years of being together. At the party they exchanged rings, said moving things to each other very emotionally, had friends and family come up and read poems and sing songs, and then they broke into a meticulously rehearsed song’n’dance routine of Bette Midler’s ‘Chapel Of Love’ which had everyone in hysterics. And yes, both grooms looked beautiful, in matching dashing suits. And yes, I always cry at weddings.
It was a lovely gracenote for me to end my time in London, however unrepresentative it was of my 12 years living there, but an archetypally fitting event for me now, as I feel open to love and kindness again. I was visiting London to say goodbye: to finish packing up all my remaining stuff in a crate and to send it off to Dublin, to go to a therapy conference and reconnect with my career again, and to go to this wedding. I tried to cram too much into a few days, but apart from that it was sweet. As I was packing up my stuff in my old flat, a bewildering number of neighbours said hi and goodbye to me over a period of six hours, more than would have greeted me in six months when I was living there. Indeed, the place is looking lovely, the courtyard garden magnificent, the local shop assistants cheery and delighted to see me again, as I was to see them. I had to remind myself that it was the venue for some of my darkest, loneliest times. I no longer feel in the grip of the harrowing withering gloom that beset me there. It appears, to my surprise and pleasure, that I’ve moved on, for which I’m extremely grateful.
Taking time out has been the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s largely due to the love and kindness of my hosts here in Italy, and the community they have built up around them, which I’ve felt part of for eight months now. I’ve felt loved here, which is not the same as knowing I am loved - I’ve made room for the feeling, allowed it to happen. Slowly I’ve thawed out from the emotional deep freeze in which I had stored part of myself while living in London. For self-protection? For healing? To feel I belonged in the London gay scene? For future regeneration?
There are different ways of coming in from the cold, of shaking the chill out of one’s bones, of warming up as a human being, of recovering from the pain of relationship break-up and depression, of escaping the icy breath of the spirit of loneliness. It strikes me that I adopted a very male, sexualized way of trying to feel alive again in London. Rather like Dr Frankenstein harnessing thunderbolts to jolt his re-membered corpse-monster to life, I had the most extraordinary electrifying encounters with men in my time in that flat. Superconductivity is only possible at low temperatures. An old mobile phone, recently switched on, obligingly lists their names for me: names I had mostly forgotten, if indeed full names there were, as some were just initials or places. But so many of them brought grins to my face. For the experience of scintillating, invigorating, riding-a-bucking-bronco passion is indeed what made me feel most thrillingly alive during those years. There are those who say that sex outside the context of relationship is not spiritual, not life-enhancing, and I can see where they are coming from. But spirit is not only in domesticity and hearth and relationship. The sparks that flew between me and those other men would light up the darkness around us with a brilliant cobalt blue; jagged, dangerous, fantastic. And yes, the darkness afterwards was, sometimes, even more intense.
But I wouldn’t change one second of it.
Another, perhaps more female way to warm up, to thaw out, to come to life, to be animated, to be infused with an anima or feminine “soul”, to be spirited, to breathe in life organically, naturally, is altogether different. It’s a slow, patient, nourishing process, steeped in nature, and it’s fundamentally relational. Away from cruel-cool anonymous urban England, living in the middle of the Italian countryside with my (mostly women) friends, I’ve mellowed and softened. I’ve gotten over myself. I’ve fallen in love with the people here, men and women. And, right at the moment, I’m aware of the bittersweet experience of loving, as someone right at the heart of my world here has suddenly had to face stomach cancer, and we’re all deeply concerned and worried. I’ve experienced the almost tangible flow of love and fear and affection in the air, especially from my friend’s partner, in a way that has humbled and moved me, that has reminded me powerfully what I’m missing out on as a single person. If being loved were ammunition enough, then my friend has won the battle already.