The
Time Traveller’s Wife
I was an awkward child in middle
school. Seventh grade was a social
minefield, now littered with memories of when my best friend became too cool
for me, I mispronounced ‘vagina’ in front of the entire class, everyone aside
from me seemed to know how to flirt, and, looking back at photographs, I
realize that I was a bit chubby. It
wasn’t until my freshman year of college, when I suddenly realised that I was
pretty, and even desirable. I started
then, to really date in earnest. I loved
the rush I got from first meeting someone, after the first date, and the first
kiss. Now, seven years later, I’m
exhausted. I watch my friends from high
school and undergrad getting engaged, married, and having children, and I can’t
help but think, “How can you be so sure, so satisfied?”
Reading through The Time Traveller’s Wife, I was a little envious of Clare, the
female protagonist, who as a young child meets Henry, her time traveling
husband. Henry arrives in a meadow near
young Clare’s childhood home. He arrives
as an adult, into Clare’s childhood.
Clare then, grows up with the certainty that one day, in her own future,
she will meet Henry and they will marry.
Although she goes through her own difficulties as an adolescent, she
knows, she has that sense of certainty that so many breakups wear down. However, throughout the book she remained
real and plausible to me. She was struck
by doubts, longing, and “consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me,
who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from
school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a
secret.” Her marriage to Henry didn’t
cause her to lose her individuality, to become a ‘we’. Henry remarked of her, “Sometimes I see an
expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind and
is sitting there knitting or something.
I’ve discovered that Clare likes to be alone.” Clare herself admits later, as a secret, that
sometimes she is glad when Henry disappears on one of his time travelling
trips.
Now, why is it that in today’s society it
seems so hard to be an ‘I’? Why the rush
to become a ‘we’? A relationship isn’t
moving forward unless you move in together and spending a Friday night alone is
looked upon with pity. We never stop,
ashamed to be caught in public with nothing to do, no phone to check, no friend
to talk to. According to my Facebook
page (a dubious source at best) true happiness is getting engaged, married, or
having a baby. While I don’t disagree
that all of these events are cause for celebration, why wait for their
appearance to be ecstatically happy? As
an alternative, I propose we all spend a little more time getting to know
ourselves, before rushing to find someone who we believe will complete us.
Clare and Henry loved one another
passionately; I have no doubt about that.
In the final chapters of the book, Henry dies, the date and manner of
his death known to him but unrevealed to Clare.
There was something beautiful, and selfless in this act that brought
tears streaming relentlessly down my cheeks.
This was a love story, but a love story of two individuals, who rather
than completing one another, made something that was greater than the whole
that each of them was.
