GLADIATORS OF LOVE!

WE LOOKED EACH OTHER SQUARE IN THE EYE. I WAS
a little nervous. When I looked at her, I knew she was nervous, too.
We were standing on the floor of the Taj, the epitome of love and romance, encircled by pristine, white marble walls _ two indentured slaves with a self-imposed sentence, serving up the punch line of a long-standing private joke. We'd come to Agra at a critical juncture of our relationship. A point at which the death match of romance either blossoms into the detente of love or folds into yet another cold war of battered egos and botched opportunities. And we were gladiators of love, both battle weary, and looking for some peace.
Romance, like war, creates two kinds of combatants. The first identifies with Robert E. Lee's remark at the Battle of Fredericksburg: "It is well that war is so terrible: We would grow too fond of it." This is the veteran who longs for another fight, who never feels so alive as when his neck is truly on the line. That bloodthirsty longing for conquest, that dangerous dance around the rim of rejection _ it gets you addicted to the adrenaline of adventure. And if you pursue this dance long enough, the notion of returning home, or of even having a home to return to, becomes foreign to you.
The second kind of combatant is more like Russell Crowe's Roman general in Gladiator: the guy who has nothing left to prove, who has conquered and been conquered, pillaged and been pillaged, for whom the end goal of any battle is the chance to return home at last.
I've always thought I was more like Lee, and _ to beat a metaphor to death _ that I wasn't ever going to be the swords-into-plowshares type, romance-wise. I felt like my love life was always going to be more like Serbia than Switzerland, always with the pleasures of peace outside my grasp. Yet there's been something here, at this monument of love, that's made me willing to discard the armour. to see if the hearts underneath still beat, to inch closer to that treaty that says war is over, and it's time to go home.
"I love you," I told her.
"I love you, too," she said.
Ah. That's so much better than, "At my signal, unleash hell."