In America, love on the road is somehow less profound than more sedentary modes of loving, perhaps because people form their internal abstract notion of romance in tandem with their other idealized imprints (justice, evil, whatever), which in turn are transmitted culturally and so are themselves imprinted upon by cultural forces; in the case of America, it is the pantheon of milestones that should accompany a life done “right” ie. home ownership, “making a living”, a mortgage, retirement, etc.
In this context, love on the road takes on perverse or transgressive qualities. Freed from the social and cultural forms it previously adhered to, it is transmuted into an impulse more perfectly aligned with the aspirant’s desires. Witness the closeted homosexual who, living within a repressive society in some more socially conservative part of the country, travels to San Francisco or Portland or Seattle and is changed by his or her experience of a deeper or truer love and declares, “I won’t go back!”
Likewise love on the road is unburdened by civic economy and the practical considerations of domestic lovers. On the road, there’s less to gain or lose in the calculus of love, and so it is a more spontaneous and simpler thing than the severe pageantry of conventional love.
Love on the road is furtive and mysterious. It has been compromised, but not in an unsexy way. There’s a serendipitous urgency to it. Complete the circuit, says your heart in transit. Love on the road is a king sized bed and a strange channel list and afterward you swim together and talk about your life back home and there are phone calls with family and the quietude of everything in between as you both digest the newness of a place. There’s magic in new places. You’re always in some sort of alchemical equilibrium with the elements of your surroundings and the transposition from departures to jet to arrivals permits deeper selves to emerge and interface directly with the novel environment and synthesize brand new selves. Love on the road makes you feel how abbreviated and circumspect our lives are.
So the more traditional and conservative a society, the more it has this dialectic of love on the road as being the more dynamic yet less profound shadow of love as it exists in the home. Witness the desire of lovers on the road who dream of seeing one anther’s home, wherever in the world it may actually be, to glean some deeper understanding of their lovers’ identity. And finally of course sometimes love on the road puts down roots and becomes love in the home. Perhaps here is the truest vision of love on the road; it is the same as love in any other place. That sounds about right.
This was brought to you by Chris Meyer, a funny guy from Seattle. Read his mad tweets @_analogy
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