Read Online Love In a Sunburnt Country by Jo Jackson King - Free Book Online

at greater risk of limerence—it can be easier to fix on someone else as the cure for our hurts than to heal ourselves. If that person then goes on to hurt us in some way, that hurt compounds our earlier hurts. We desperately seek to re-engage with that person—or, if all hope is gone, we might look for someone else to love us. In this way the limerent person can become more and more emotionally dependent.
    Not every couple experiences limerence. There are many reasons for this. For example, a young woman hurt by years in a messy, limerent relationship, such as Robina, might do everything she could to avoid that feeling again. Robina was determined to avoid limerent love, but she missed entirely the significance of the scaffold of fun, friendship and utter dependability that Aaron had constructed beneath her. Limerence is not the only pathway into deep love. Lust coupled with liking also works just fine.
    â€˜He was my boss for twelve months and he taught me so many things, and I learnt so much more about him like that.’
    She learned that Aaron could communicate clearly and deliberately without words by watching him work alongside Aboriginal stockmen who have another language of sign, expression and posture. It is a fast and fluent language that conveys volumes to the people who know it, but which the rest of us simply don’t see. She saw that peer pressure didn’t touch him. She came to admire his work ethic and his competence deeply. She learned that while Aaron isn’t traditionally romantic he could make a corned-meat sandwich shared on the back of a Toyota feel romantic.
    â€˜After nine months together he said: “Can we say you’re my girlfriend now?”—he’d just waited for me to own it.’ Robina hadn’t seen love coming for her, but there was no doubt in her mind now that it was love that she was feeling.
    And it was in this same year that Robina met for the first time what she refers to as a ‘shape-changing demon’.
    Robina first experienced this demon as perfectionism. She was determined to be the ‘perfect station wife’. She wanted to be competent on the property and simultaneously totally in control on the home front.
    â€˜It was as if I thought this would be appealing. I wanted to show him,’ she says, mystified at herself all these years later. ‘I’d seen his nana do this, do the men’s work and the other stuff as well, so I thought I could totally slip into this.’
    She was up at dawn to leave the homestead, and when they returned from the day’s work after dark, Robina cooked the evening meal, as well as the breakfast, smoko and lunch for the following day.
    â€˜One day in the yard I was drafting. I was on a five-way gate, Aaron was yelling from the back of the race which way the gate needed to go. I was very new to this work, and there were heaps of blokes in the yard. And I let a cow that needed to go back out to pasture in with the cattle to go to market. And Aaron yelled at me, and he swore at me. He’s normally very even-tempered, so I was a wreck by smoko. I’d packed things for smoko and things for lunch, and he asked me which I was going to get out, and I told him, but then I took out the other one. And Aaron said: “What are you doing?”—quite nicely, but that was it. I had to get away, I just cried and cried. And he had no idea how to deal with that with all the men around. And then when we got home I went into the shower.’
    In the shower she cried some more. Aaron came and awkwardly apologised for yelling and swearing at her. Long days working with stock roughens tempers and tongues and forgiveness all round is the only way to be able to work together the following day. Robina and Aaron did forgive each other and kept on forgiving each other and learning about each other through what was mostly a beautiful year. At the end of it, Robina had not just learned a great many