LOVE AIN’T ENOUGH

 

That’s a bitter pill to swallow. Or as a slightly oversexed friend likes to say, a bitter pillow to bite.

When you’re in a relationship you realize love has all the limitations of glue:  It can’t stick if the parts don’t fit. I thought about all this when I bumped into an ex-boyfriend, who reminded me of a column I wrote about our break-up.  It was the first time I had ever written about love, and I remember being startled by the emotional response it got:

Our relationship ended after six or seven years.  That I couldn’t remember exactly when we met or how long we’d been together was a constant source of irritation to him.  Enraged at my memory lapses, he would introduce me as “my boyfriend, Ronald Reagan.”

We fought for all the reasons people fight-money, misunderstanding, lust, and trust.  At first, problems came at us with all the weight of mid-summer snowflakes.  They melted before we even had the chance to flick them off.  But winter crept in and suddenly nothing would melt.  There was no avalanche, really.  I guess the snow just built up and caved the roof in. 

We drifted into a trial separation.  He got more clarity and I got more distant.  One day the phone rang.  He looked at the caller ID.

“Who is it?” I asked.  “You,” he answered.

Confused, I walked over and saw what the caller ID flashed:   “UNAVAILABLE.”

I wonder if men are really capable of working things out in a relationship.  We have what it takes to love but do we have what it takes to stay?  Straight men can barely stay with women; what are the odds gay men can stay with each other?

We want our relationships to last like trees, stately oaks with deep roots that last forever.  But our relationships endure more like perennials, barely scratching the topsoil, coming back again and again in bloom-and-doom boomerangs.

Our relationship boomeranged from one end of the spectrum to the other, but our love didn’t.  It was so palpable, so present.  But people who think that’s all you need to keep a relationship going are wrong.  And single, too.  Only the unmarried think you can save a relationship with more love.

My love never changed, but my dreams did.  And so did his.  The steadiness of our affection and the changes in our aspirations met like an irresistible force crashing into an immovable object.  The only thing left standing was our dogs.

In the final moments before he left, we hugged and cried for so long I didn’t think we’d ever let go of each other.  I joked and told him I was crying because I felt so bad for him, that I knew how hard it would be to live without me.  He said he was crying because I was holding him so tight.

As he pulled away in his rented truck, I realized what happened in his rear-view mirror is what happened in his heart.  I got smaller and smaller until I was no longer there.

I waved until the truck pulled out of sight.  Only once before, at my brother’s funeral, had grief overwhelmed me with such force.

Now I’m single, at an age where I remember thinking “I could never date anyone that old.”   But I’m also at the point where I can appreciate the deal brokered between age and wisdom.  Life does not take youth and beauty away from you; you are released from them.  And one of the things this bittersweet freedom allows is the capacity to experience profound love.  Like I did, for six or seven years.