The Price of Admission

I first heard Rose Morgan talk about love when I was eighteen, sitting in a movie theater watching Barbara Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces.  I was young enough to believe I understood her.

I didn’t.

I understood longing. I understood romance. I understood the dizzy thrill of being chosen.

At eighteen, I was young, hot, with an 18‑year‑old ass and all the confidence that comes with it. Of course I didn’t see myself in Rose.

But she was my literary hero. She was brilliant, admired for her mind rather than her looks — which, at that age, felt strangely erotic to me. Intelligence as seduction. Insight as allure.

What I didn’t understand was the price of admission.

Rose spent several minutes building her argument — pacing the classroom, pulling students into her orbit, turning theory into something painfully human. She didn’t just talk about passion. She performed it.

Her lecture ended abruptly, decisively: “Because it’s fucking great.”

I spent years believing there were more important things to do than fall hopelessly in love.

So I did them. I went to school. I built a career. I raised a family. I made a life.

Gregory, meanwhile, had his own theory about a very different kind of partnership — a marriage without sex, lust, or chemistry. Odd, coming from a mathematician who lived his life by equations.

He imagined two twin beds as a marital setup, side by side but not touching. And he believed a long movie — Lawrence of Arabia, of all things — could lull him and his future wife to sleep each night.

And then, when I was finally old enough to know better, I fell hopelessly in love.

Gregory believed he could have intimacy without desire. Rose believed she could live with that bargain because being loved was better than not being loved at all.

Neither of them could.

Rose wanted to be desired. Gregory wanted to remain safely untouched by desire. And somewhere between twin beds, hurt feelings and all their carefully construced rules, they discovered the obvious thing neither of them wanted to admit:

You can't negotiate your way out of vulnerability.

The part that irritated me most was what happened when Rose finally stopped waiting for Gregory to want her. She turned her attendtion back to herself. And suddenly, maddeningly, he did.

Maybe because desire has a peculiar relationship with availability. Maybe it's because Gregory finally understood what he stood to lose. Or maybe Rose simply stopped asking another person to confirm something she needed to know for herself.

At eighteen, I would have thought the victory was that Gregory finally wanted her.

Now I'm not so sure.

I think the victory was that Rose no longer needed him to.

Turns out, Rose was right. Falling in love is fucking great.

Staying there is considerably more complicated.

Nobody tells you that the price of admission isn't just the possibility of heartbreak. It's surrender. It's allowing another human being access to all the places you 've spent decades fortifying. It's discovering  that the person who makes you feel safest in the world possesses the terrifying ability to make you feel profoundly unsafe.

At eighteen, I thought being chosen was the prize.

I know now that choosing someone—again and again, particularly when you're scared—is where the real story begins.

But choosing someone cannot require abandoning yourself.

Maybe that's another part of the admission price I didn't understand at eighteen. Loving someone deeply and belonging to yourself are not opposing ideas. The trick is learning how to do both.

At eighteen, I thought I understood Rose.

I didn't.

It took me decades to understand she was telling me why, despite everything it can cost us, we keep doing it anyway.

Because it's fucking great.