When Love Fails . . .
. . . and it will,
Where do you go? Who do you talk to? What do you do next?
It’s too easy to say, “You cry, and then you go on.”
It’s too easy to melt into yourself and say, “I will never give myself over to love again.”
What’s hard, so very hard, is to accept that it has happened. Love has failed. We are put on this earth, I believe, to learn the one universal truth that all created beings are meant to learn, and that is Love. Giving it, receiving it, accepting it. Knowing it for what it is, and what it isn’t. It is not a lesson easily learned. The curriculum is long and difficult, the instructor demanding and invisible. Our teacher is nurturing and patient one day, harsh and unforgiving the next. We work in groups and independently, some of us not at all, but none of us comes to earth and gets to skip the class. We can’t; the Earth and this Life are the classroom. We drink the water and feed the fire.
When I was as small as I could be, perhaps two and a half or three years old, my parents were friends with another couple who had a little girl the same age as I was. I don’t remember any of their names or what the connection between the two families was, I only remember the little girl. Her name was Jinx. I have a picture of the two of us kissing. Were we in love? Hardly. But I do remember the moment. It was a moment that was to influence all moments that followed, a moment that influences me still. But sometime after that magic instant Jinx and I drifted apart. I guess we started to “mature” and “see other people.” Maybe one of our families moved away to another part of town, or another state, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Whether we were two tiny iron filings drawn together for a second by some unseen magnetic force, some other force mightier than the magnetic one pulled the plug, turned off the juice, and suddenly there was no more attraction.
I grew. As with all children and young adolescents, I waded ever deeper into the river of Life and felt the alternating warm and cold currents of Love rushing around and over me. I recall with great fondness the Lezinski twins, the push and pull of attraction between me and Lucinda Pintard; my first real girlfriend Amy Newkirk. In middle school there was an endless line of crushes, both real and imagined: Melinda McHeran, Margaret Ross, Christine Neider, Laura Tokash, Haven Suarez . . . In high school, the same. Margaret Janone, Cindy Barone, Cheryl Hannon, Becky Davis, until . . .
. . . I met Vicki. The one true girlfriend I had all through my final two years of high school. Loved her madly; couldn’t go a day without seeing her. When my family spent a week in Florida that first Christmas while Vicki stayed at home in Tennessee, I thought I would die. When I got back home I fell into her arms and stayed there for the whole next year. Then, one day toward the end of my senior year, without warning, another girl winked at me in the hallway on my way to English and I knew I was no longer in love with Vicki. Two months after that my family left for Texas, and I never saw her again. It is not narcissism on my part to say she was devastated when I gave up on her, and only later did I realize— or at least come to believe —I had made a huge mistake. The girl was desperately in love with me, and for immature and unknown reasons at the time, I rejected her affection. Lesson learned: never ever turn down guaranteed, genuine Love.
There were other relationships in the following years, my most intense and debilitating one being, again, with a single girl in my final two years of college. Teri Brison. The bond was strong, the possibilities there to be molded into reality and a lifelong commitment, but as soon as we blinked, something changed. In her, in me, I’m not sure. All I know is that the lights went out. I said, “Take me with you,” and she said, as sweetly and kindly as she could, “No.”
There was Tina DeSa, a lovely young woman from North Carolina I met, befriended, and ultimately fell in love with in Africa. As surely as the sun rises, we were on a straight and perfect road to lifelong romance. But then the sun went down. One minute she was there, the next minute she was gone.
Terina came next. A whirlwind fairy tale romance if ever there was one that resulted in engagement and a ring in the moving summer shadow of New York City’s Rockefeller Center. But that too came to a surreal and unanticipated end less than a year later. To this day I don’t know why. As Bruce Springsteen wrote in his song When You’re Alone, “Nobody knows, honey, where love goes, but when it’s gone, it’s gone.” And ours was gone.
But the gods are merciful— and vengeful. Only two years later they sent me the woman who was to become my wife for 23 years as well as the mother of my children. Shoulder deep in the waters of Life by this time, the currents of Love grew chilly and swift around me and threatened to knock me off my feet and drown me. Pushed forward and thrown face-down in the rip current, I thrashed and splashed my way to shore-- a mere sandbar --and, gasping for breath, I crawled to safety, just in time to regain my wind and my sanity, thanking my lucky stars the experience didn’t kill me.
And so, for the past several years I have been doing what human beings do when Love fails: I have been sitting on the beach, recovering and watching Life rush out to sea. I’ve been afraid to go near the water, let alone wade back in. The problem with sitting on the shore like that, however, is that while you’re safe— you can’t drown on dry land, that’s for sure —you stay put. You go nowhere. The only way to the future is on the undulating waves of the ocean. It is the tides of Life that will carry you farther out to sea and closer to the next sunrise. What is beyond that horizon you won’t know until you get there, and how warm or cold the waters of Love will be as you sail onward, who can say?
What you come to realize, though, once you have sat on that sandbar long enough to regain your wind, dry out, and recover your courage, is that the only thing to do when love fails is to wade back into the surf, tentatively perhaps, but forward against the breakers. I’m up to my knees now, and taking it one step at a time. I can’t wait until I am past the breakers once more, where the water is deep enough again for me to swim.
