Love and Learning in Oslo

Sagene, maybe midnight. Maybe just before. It’s late. I had my usual spot at the local park, up on the rise where a couple of benches sit, with a view to the whole place. It’s January and it is cold — really cold — but I don’t mind it. 

In Norway, they know how to bundle up. Frankly, living two entirely separate existences — from the bright, warmer months to the dark, colder ones — is a necessity. Norwegian winter isn’t a joke, it’s real. You get endless false summits of the snow finally melting, only for it to fall again and again and again.

I was triple-layered all over, beanie on my head and a flask of piping hot coffee in hand as I sat out to smoke. I was escaping, in truth. There was always a part of me in that relationship that just needed…air. I just had to, wanted to. Then of course, I’d feel mildly guilty that I’d pulled such an escape hatch and left my girlfriend back in the flat.

I took my seat on the bench, my increasingly customary spot. I looked up to see the Big Dipper faintly flickering in the sky above. This was my little refuge. Yet that led to a significant question… why exactly did I even need a refuge?

***

I was in Norway, following the girl I loved. She and I had been together some six years when back home came calling for her and, on open invite, I followed.

We both left London feeling we’d found the person we would gladly spend the rest of our lives with. It was magical. Leaving the only country I’d ever known in the name of romance was exhilarating. (It’s also one of the coolest ways to sign off from a job).

We spent six months living at her folks’ place. Amazing people, brilliant hosts, with a pristine haven of a home. I sat, got fed, and mildly fat when, legally, I couldn’t do anything else. It was around the six month mark when my girlfriend got a job interview in Oslo. We moved to the capital and got a little apartment with a balcony in a beautiful, leafy corner.

It’s rare that reality lands like an anvil, giving that shuddering sweep of blood running cold. Those sideswipes happen, but they aren’t often. Usually, typically, reality unfolds, slowly, carefully, over time. As it has been said in writings more important than this one, “God gives us as much truth as we can handle”.

In retrospect, I was running on myths: Myths and half truths — all well meant, I should caveat. It would dawn on me in the weeks ahead that I’d be taking advice about living in Norway from someone who hadn’t actually done that since school age.

Myth Number 1 – Norway is not that expensive.

We were Londoners. We’d spent the best part of our formative 20’s in the Big Smoke. It’s a major capital, and, like most, it comes at a premium. Even so, my girlfriend was fairly confident that the cost of living would be about the same.

I believe we were about two food shops in when she’d turn to me and said,

 “Norway’s bloody expensive, isn’t it?”

Myth Number 2 – Everyone Speaks English There. You’ll Be Fine

Now this is a slippery one. Mostly because it is true. The vast majority of Osloaites (or, in Norwegian, Osloenser) I met or made friends with had a comfortable and easy grasp of English. Yet how this related to job markets was less than inspiring. The inference that speaking Norwegian wasn’t a necessity for employment turned out not to be true. My preceding months of Duolingo were far from enough to get by…

Myth Number 3 – Work Part Time, Do Your Writing

The only doubt I had in moving was that I’d be making major changes in my life I wasn’t ready for. I was confident in the relationship, in my partner, and in the move to a part of the world that gave her family a support network. We spoke before moving and she gracefully, beautifully, gave me the green light: do it, go for it, live your dream. Work some 25-30 hours a week and spend the rest of your time doing what you love.

However, with the above two items being so, this was simply impossible.

All this unfolded over the opening weeks and into months of living in Norway. Reality can never live up to fantasy; that’s why we’re generally dissuaded from it. My partner got a job that was really well paying, and she was good for it. Honestly, she had an incredible mind, a remarkably intelligent person.

She went on a coding course while we were living at her folks’. She got head-hunted by one of the biggest publishers in the country, for a well-paid and profoundly contemporary job. The flipside of the coin was: it swallowed her whole.

She was consumed by it. She stressed about it approaching work. She stressed about it during work, and she stressed about it after work. It became the only topic of conversation when she was back. Weekends were increasingly matters of recuperation, when she was regularly beleaguered with migraines.

I couldn’t help but feel gut-punched at the irony. She was so deserving of this job. This was an immensely capable and smart individual. London’s job market had been indifferent, when not cruel, to her. Finally, she got a chunk of employment that actually measured up to her value. Yet this was the first time a valuable and well paying role had come her way in our time together. I was so happy for her getting the post, but once again, reality clashed with fantasy and visions. I’d never considered that a job which actually made the most of that brilliant brain would leave her depleted and despondent.

I don’t know when exactly the turn happened —when I started to feel the pressure cooker — but I remember a firm sense that… I’d lost my place in the relationship. I began to feel invisible and powerless. My freelancing engagements were hardly enough to line pockets, and Norway is expensive. Her mind was elsewhere, with no conversation but work. I felt like a passenger. As for my love… that was the burn, I still loved her, but love is a raw and beautiful force with many different faces.

She felt like home. I cared for her deeply. I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility and care for her happiness. I was a best friend, a father figure, a flatmate, and definitely a source of comfort. But… lover, romantic partner? Something got lost on the flight from Heathrow to Oslo. Something altered as the reality of living in Norway unfolded. She was deeply committed to me, and I’d drawn a line in the sand by moving over, but something was gone.

Seven years in, was this normal? How does one tell? Who does one ask? What makes you know?

***

Sagene, gone ten pm, maybe midnight. It’s cold out–or is it? It could be spring, summer. I spent so much time finding my little spot up at the park it’s something of a blur. I do remember kissing my girlfriend before heading to the park, clear as day. I remember her face; I remember coming away from the kiss with it… just not feeling right.

The spot was quiet, just the occasional dog walker passing through. Sitting on the bench, I felt full– something in me not sitting right. Maybe it was the kiss, the relationship.. It was this dark, uncomfortable presence in my psyche that refused to be ignored. My mind swam as memories plumed.

Cabin trips in the spring and summer. Seven beautiful Christmases worthy of oil paintings. A family taking me in as one of their own. Hard times in London. Good times in London. The uncomfortable ups and downs of being a twenty-something. The wonderful ups and downs of being twenty-something lovers. Friends back home. Embarrassments. Arguments. Uproarious laughter. Binge-watching series. Holidays and trips together. Tender holding of one another. Comforting each other through losses. The opening joy of starting up in Oslo together. Her cute face…

I stood up from the bench, my cup ready to spill. I stepped forward just a matter of steps, looking out to the horizon, just a few trees and high-rises filling a spread of skyline. To no one, to anyone, the words left my lips with a throat as tight as vice:

“This isn’t the one…”

And I cried and I cried and I cried. I bawled like an infant, alone in relative darkness. I’d moved everything I had and left everything behind for this. I was all in. I’d rolled the dice and I got snake eyes.

***

What followed was a year of trying. I tried the good-cop way and we kept the groove of the relationship. I tried the bad-cop way and disturbed the groove of the relationship, but not for the better. Sometime in June the following year, I broke the relationship off. Despite the well of tears that followed for us both in the weeks and months ahead, it would increasingly dawn on us that it was the right decision.

I don’t know if my eureka moment was realizing the relationship had to end, or the conviction that came about myself having made the leap. By the time I had to leave Norway, I’d entirely placed my happiness and self-worth in someone else.

I’d taken the archaic maxim ‘happy wife, happy life’ to an extremis that just abandoned me. There were parasitic elements that I couldn’t reconcile or take pride in: your country, you got the good job, you take the reins now.

I’d stopped treating love with love. Some ghastly dependency arrived with an utter sense of resentment; that the success of the move for her hadn’t instantly equated to a glowing happiness. Moving countries for your love is certainly a man’s choice, and I’d turned out a scared boy.

Returning to the UK brought a determination. I couldn’t look to or depend on externals; I needed to look at me. I wanted responsibility and change, with a full understanding that they are harbingers of stress and challenge. I wanted to be the architect and accountable party for my own happiness and never lose sight of that.

I desired reality, even if it meant the frightening prospect of staring it down the barrel. I wanted to be someone who could take that. I set out to do the work of becoming the guy I was meant to be, not someone I thought I was… running on myths out of someone else’s mouth and covert contracts about others.

***

Creative destruction is a term for economics but I feel it can be more broadly applied. Sometimes the antiseptic stings; we have to make decisions that are painful at the time for better results down the line. That’s certainly turned out to be true. I’m very much becoming who I was meant to be with a steeper degree of self-worth, insight and responsibility than I’d ever had in my life. I’m also pursuing what I love more diligently and consistently than I’ve ever done.

As for the villainous matter of being the breaker in the break-up…

When I left my partner, she had a beautiful, full furnished apartment and a well-paying job in the capital of her country. She was just a train ride away from family and had a blooming social life in the city. This hasn’t changed.

There’s a saying that “sometimes, in order to find love, we must hurt the ones we love”.

We’re both for the better for it, with a deeper understanding of love and ourselves that staying together could never have fulfilled. She’s free now and so am I, living the lives we want to.

That’s the reality– no myths required.