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New Love Stories

Speaking Of The
Love Of Your Life...

The Love of Your Life: What We Learn from Living in the grip of passion
by Susan Baur.

Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks,
November 2002
$14.95/trade paperback
266 pages
ISBN: 1-57071-871-7

“In claiming a love of a lifetime, we
take a brave stand. It is an act of
self-trust and an act of faith. No
wonder people are proud of the
certainty they feel when they say,
“Love of a lifetime? I know exactly
what you mean.”  Susan Baur

When I was over forty, a man I had dated in college picked up my book The Dinosaur Man at a distant Border’s Bookstore and then, as I had been fantasizing for decades, picked up the phone and called me. We had not been in touch for years, and although I had married, raised children, started two careers, and divorced during that time, I had also begun to long for this love the way a compass yearns for north. Whenever I thought of love, I swung toward the place I’d last seen him and asked a hundred questions beginning with, “Are you alive?”

At first, I got short answers: “It’s your soul mate.” “It’s like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.” “It’s the person you’d take a bullet for.” “It’s a stupid publicity gimmick.” Next I got hints: “My grandmother couldn’t marry the man she loved, but he waited for her, and twenty years later they finally got together.” Or, “When my mother died, we found she wanted to be buried wearing a certain ring--not the one my father gave her.” And finally I got the whole story: “Love of a lifetime? I know exactly what you mean. I thought I would die and yet . . . it was the most perfect romance in the world. Let me begin at the beginning.”

When men and women 18 to 80 finally told me their stories, I was surprised to learn that happily-ever-after was not the only way they ended. In fact the ending didn’t seem nearly as important as the love itself--the electric bolt from the blue that banished forever the feeling that something terribly important had been missing from their experience. Some stories told of a love that led to the altar after overcoming great obstacles, but just as often stories described love arriving at an inconvenient time and joining men and women who weren’t ready, were married to someone else, or who held incompatible beliefs. “Do you ever hear dumb stories,” a woman asked, “like where someone makes a fool of herself?” “Yes indeed,” I assured her. “Well I ran off with a con man after knowing him five days and lost everything,” she confided, “and yet when I think of love. . . .”

Five years and many stories later, I realized that the love of a lifetime is an initiation into life. It is the passionate romance that reveals the best and the worst of us and propels us into taking the greatest emotional gamble of our lives. Once caught in the grip of passion, we see ourselves and the world in a new way and learn things that gentler forms of love can’t teach.

We discover how hungry we are for life, how little control we have over the things that really count, how giving not getting is what determines how we remember a love affair, how something inside us is stronger than anything outside, and more. Although we are commonly told that if love doesn’t last, there was something wrong with it, the stories I heard did not agree. They maintained that the first time you love wholeheartedly remains in your heart as a special memory regardless of how it turned out. This passionate leap of faith begins a transformation that other loves may complete, but not erase. When a heart embarks on its greatest adventure, it’s the adventure, not the destination that counts.

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About the Author:
When I was ten years old I started a newspaper for my cousins, and to my embarrassment, I remember that it included a love story that ran in installments from week to week. I know the story was terrible, because I remember two lines. “Kiss me,” John said. Barbara looked up in surprise. “Why?”

Not surprisingly perhaps, one of my first jobs after graduating from college was writing for a newspaper. First in New York State and then in Florida where I reported on oceanography, I took my notebook and my curiosity everywhere. When I won a Mark Ethridge Fellowship for my reporting, I was able to go to graduate school at Duke University where I studied the history of science. There I began a book on the history of oceanography and discovered that telling a very long story--a book--was more satisfying than telling many short ones. Moving to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, a seaside community devoted to the study of the ocean, I finished first one and then two books on oceanography. The first won a Pfizer Award for the history of science.

But did I want to spend years writing books that only a few people read? I did not. So my next book was on the history of hypochondria, a painful psychological state that I had intimate knowledge of although I wouldn’t admit it at the time. For four years I studied the history of medicine and psychology, and when I finally wrote the book, no-one would publish it.

After some twenty submissions, a publisher explained to me that my manuscript would not be taken seriously unless I had the letters M.D. or Ph. D. after my name. The first was impossible, both because medical school would give me the creeps and with a husband and two children I had no time. So instead, I enrolled at Harvard University and then Boston College to earn a doctorate in psychology and become a clinical psychologist. On the day I entered Boston College, the book on hypochondria found a publisher.

Now I was a writer and a psychologist, and the latter opened some heavy, locked doors that few people are able to go through. In my last years of training, I worked at a large public hospital and there took care of--or more accurately learned from--a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that he and I were both dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, he taught me, stroll for hours through the hot summer fields behind hospital buildings looking for half-empty cans of Coca Cola, cigarette butts, and naked women. They eat pumpkins which they break open with their enormous feet. I adored the Dinosaur Man, as I came to think of him. Perhaps my affection was influenced by my recent divorce and the death of my father, for the Dinosaur Man’s loneliness seemed to match my own in that sad time. Or perhaps it was the strange tales he told which caught my imagination. In any case, I wrote up my accounts of our meetings every day, and when I got my degree, turned my notes into the book Dinosaur Man. Jodi Foster decided to turn it into a film, and it was exciting to see the book turned into a script. Several years later, she decided not to make the film, and that was all right too.

I wrote two more books on psychology, Confiding, which concerns the stories we tell about our lives, and The Intimate Hour, which describes passionate doctor-patient love affairs from Freud’s time to the present. In the latter, I had expected to find only exploitive relationships between arrogant doctors and vulnerable women, but to my surprise, in addition there were love affairs that marked a turning point in both lives. As I was brooding over a particularly amazing love affair between a Dutch Jew and her German therapist which took place during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, I picked up the phone to hear the voice of my college sweetheart for the first time in some 30 years. What resulted was The Love of Your Life.