I married a woman decades ago because we seemed to want the same things. We loved children and wanted to have our own. We liked outdoor activities, and lived healthy lives. We had great sex, the kind of stuff that you remember for days and months and even years later – though I didn’t. I remember one day waking up and realizing there was more to this relationship than just getting her off. I wasn’t getting off myself, spiritually or sexually. I was feeling a satisfaction around bringing her pleasure, but a question always remained about my own. I imagined it would work itself out in time. The reality is, one cannot count on love to be that ‘work it out’ sort of take on life. It has to be or it is not. Sometimes we think we know what love is and just when we decide we have it cornered something happens, and that feeling, that shared mystique, everything about the chemistry of the moment goes out the fucking window.
I was unhappy in the first year of my marriage. I should have left then and acknowledged the mistake. But, I made a commitment and I am Catholic, so I was stuck, then months later she was pregnant. At that point I wasn’t going anywhere. The other end of that story is that together we did raise two beautiful children, and so there is that piece to give a craving soul some peace of mind. But the mistake I made in the beginning never forgave itself, and I walked around unhappy and confused for thirty years.
Today, I look at love in a different light. I fell in love with someone decades ago whom I could not be with. I wanted to, we both wanted to but we both eventually knew we could not, I still want to and wish she did too, but together we can no longer speculate. I have gone through a divorce in the last couple of years and as freeing as that has seemingly been for me, it has also offered a cinching hangman’s noose around me I have not been able to shed. I swore I wouldn’t fall in love with anyone ever again, and I did. I fell in love with an old high school sweetheart, and together we had an unbridled half year of romance and lovely elegance, but then it unraveled. And while doing so, I could not get a grip on any of it, and just slowly degraded any credibility I had in the relationship with every following move.
I tried to be accepting, but I needed answers. I tried to give her time, but I missed her too badly. I tried to navigate through my head how everything she had said to me, poured her soul out to me mattered, and yet when I spoke to her it was as if none of it existed, and I tried to have her explain that to me and I couldn’t, I just wasn’t able to ever have the conversation I hoped we might.
This morning I woke and realized all the changes I made for her. My wardrobe, my look and appearance, my choices in life, all of them were made for her and not for me. And she knew that, there was a time even when she didn’t mind that but all of a sudden one day it became tiresome and in her mind we were done. Didn’t matter at all that I could never catch up to the reasoning.
So ugly love, yeah, it exists. It happens when two people are no longer thinking the same, one is desperately moving a different direction, while the either thinks the fight to stay together is still a good fight.
I’ve lost in love nearly all my life, and yet, I still have some hope. I still search for meaning in what some would call the life of a hopeless romantic.
© Scott F Savage 6/2021
