I was embarrassed for mourning a six month relationship for three years. THREE YEARS. Was I stupid, desperate, weak, pathetic? I asked myself these questions while dealing with the gut-wrenching pain of never seeing this man again. I couldn't talk to others about it; my friends had preconceived notions about when love happened, how it happened, and when it proved to be true or not, and most of its measures had to do with length and test of time. Furthermore, a six month relationship did not warrant three years of heartache my friend Monique would have said to me, so I didn't bother anyone with this conversation - or with my loss. But what if love was timeless, what if its experience was relative only to the true feelings shared and pure moments experienced? What if it outlasted even the marriage vows, until death due us part?
I met him on an international website. We talked for six months, and then we met for a weekend in Amsterdam. He was Swedish, and he flew for an international airline, so meeting in another country was not big deal for him, but it was nerve-wracking for me. I worried about the sex, our feelings in real time, and spending three days together on what constituted a blind date. He paid for the airfare and got the best hotel in town.
I can go into details about that weekend and our first meeting, but the proof of our love was in its sense of naturalness; it belonged everywhere and anywhere. We could have been in Amsterdam for three minutes, thirty days, or three hundred years, it didn't matter. We experienced what Graham Greene defined as "love that strikes suddenly out of a clear blue sky." But then he disappeared. He didn't want a relationship. He wasn't cut out for them, he said, especially ones with such spiritual overtones.
At the time he left, my personal life was in shambles: my son was going to college, and my 16 year old daughter was moving in with her father. I was going to start again, but I thought I needed a man to facilitate my move. A man had always helped me "jump ship." Really, I was too stressed, overweight, tired of the heat in Florida, and the same grueling day to day to think I had to strength to start again on my own. At first, I thought we would marry. He asked, and I planned on moving to Sweden. When he disappeared, I decided to move anyway, even though it was not far as Europe. I started again with a broken heart.
The other day I realized something about my heartache, which was now just a memory; that even in the midst of all the grueling physical and emotional work needed to move to Maine, lose 30 pounds of unnecessary weight, reconstruct my finances, and pursue my dreams of writing and traveling, that it was love that not only took me to a place of ecstasy, but to its underworld of loss and pain, a place that tested my courage and grit. Like in the myth of Eros and Psyche, my lover presented me with a mirror, and I ran with my reflection until I saw myself in a truer light, a light that shone on my adventurous and independent nature, lost in a past of overwhelming responsibilities, commitment, marriage, divorce, and single-motherhood. I realized I didn't need my lover to save my life; I needed him to break my heart, so I could find the courage to save my own life. My memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at:
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