New Love Stories
Over the past two years several hundred women an men have written to me about the love of their lives. A few either complement me--"good job"--or themselves--"I am glad to know I am one of the lucky ones." However, the ones I value express explosive insights into an experience that has confused them or give vent to the terrible hurt of heartbreak. These letters are so heartfelt and so to the point of what life is about that I am honored to receive them. It seems as if I have gained, not a new family exactly, but a new tribe. "She's a lot like me," I think to myself as I read. "She has basically the same hopes and heartaches, and she thinks about them much as I do." I know we would become friends if we met. Even more, I find myself rooting for their well being.
In spite of the similarities, two things have surprised me. One involves the large number of women in their forties who have married before experiencing a great love. For the most part these women married well but they were not confident enough in their 20s to throw themselves head first into a grand love affair. Then, years later, they met or re-met a man who swept them off their feet. This time they jumped and began a fiery, secret liaison in spite of the risks it posed, or still poses, to marriage, children, and career. Apparently with women's increasing independence comes a greater reluctance to miss out on any experience that is considered "essential" to a full and successful life. Married women who find passion outside their marriage is just one example. Single, unmarried women who have children on their own is another as are women who have a demanding career then embark on motherhood in their mid or late forties. Clearly some of us are trying to pack every good experience into a single lifetime. What I would like to know is, how many of the women who experience a grand passion outside their marriage return their full attention to their family and what happens when they do. I have heard from several women old enough to look back on 60 or 70 years of life, and all say that for better or worse the love-of-a lifetime-affair changed them. For some it took away the sense that they had been cheated by life. Wiser, a bit bruised perhaps, these women felt completed. They stopped flirting or "trolling," as one put it, and settled down to husband and family with a new willingness. Others consider their passionate affair a mistake. It proved they are selfish, they say, and in this and other ways the memory of the affair has become an obstacle which makes a satisfactory marriage impossible. What should a good woman do? Even the great love affairs that do not include sex, seem to be a betrayal from the point of view of their families.
The second surprise is how mightily lovers wrestle with heartbreak and how much they learn from it. It is almost tempting to say that the greatest lesson that the love of a lifetime bestows is not the message "you have the capacity to love and be loved without reserve," but "you have the capacity to survive the big slams of life so stop worrying about yourself and get on with your life."
During the month of February, I will be adding three stories (names and places changed) and an Egyptian myth that illustrate the different phases of a "successful heartbreak." That term may sound silly, but it's not. A fully and painfully felt heartbreak that is compassionately and intelligently understood is such a necessary lesson for everyone that even the mythologies of many cultures include stories of the heartbreaks suffered by the Gods themselves.
Heartbreak Number 1. "I'm stuck!"
When Pam Dawson was 52 years old, she kicked her on-again, off-again boyfriend out of her Boston apartment, bought a ticket to Denver , Colorado , and decided to find out once and for all if she had any future with the man who had been the love of her life since she was 20 years old. "Mad Mark," as she called him, now lived with a woman in Denver where the two ran an ad agency. Pam wasn't going to call or e-mail with this question. She wanted to get the answer face to face.
After some finagling, Pam got Mark to agree to meet her for a long lunch at a hotel in Downtown Denver where, she told him, she was staying on business. On The Day, she purposefully arrived before he did, ordered a drink at the bar, and started to remember. Pam and Mark had first met when she was 20 and he 35. It was in a hotel not very different from this one on a frigid winter's day. Pam, who at the time was a junior in college, worked as a hostess at the hotel restaurant between semesters. One slow afternoon she saw a distraught, disorganized man blow into the lobby and head straight for her. He was still throwing off flurries of snow with every step when he stopped in front of her and tried to speak.
"Did you . . . ? Do you . . . ?" he began but couldn't get his words to come out. Instead he stared at her as if, he told her later, she was the first woman he had ever seen in his life. Like an allergic reaction in reverse, what he felt was not exactly love or sexual attraction, but total upheaval. It was a confusing sensation to say the least, for Mark had been married in this hotel exactly one week before. He had returned to see if anyone had turned in a lost pearl earring.
Mark and Pam exchanged names and enough information so that they could find each other again which they did some six months later. The upheaval happened again and shortly thereafter they started an affair. Burning like a long fuse on a firecracker, the relationship repeatedly sputtered, died, and miraculously revived. When Pam herself married, the affair was put on hold for a decade, but it then continued intermittently through his divorce, remarriage, and second divorce. She too divorced, but by that time, Mark had moved in with his partner in the ad agency. Now she was 52, he 67, and it was time to act.
Pam had positioned herself at the hotel bar where she could see the revolving door in the lobby. When she took a sip of her drink, the glass rattled as she set it down. Right on time, a familiar silhouette came spinning through the door. His overcoat flapping, Mark strode into the bar and scooped Pam off the stool. The old upheaval was as powerful as ever, and as sparks seemed to come out of Mark's eyes, Pam felt herself become breathtakingly beautiful, smart, and powerful. Pulling back, they locked glances and smiled ecstatically. This was life at its indescribable best.
Pam and Mark talked for four hours that afternoon, Mark excusing himself several times to call the office on his cell. Surely, Pam thought, he feels what I feel, and no-one, but no-one can turn that feeling down. But that's just what Mark did at the end of the afternoon. As sensitively and honestly as he could, he told Pam that while she was indeed the most beautiful and passionate woman he had ever known, he was 67 with two failed marriages behind him. He wasn't willing to throw away the solid, ordinary relationship he and his partner Willie had fashioned together over the past three years.
"It's 'real,'" he kept repeating.
"As if passion isn't," Pam shot back. "Tell me," she continued, "look me in the eye and tell me that you feel more chemistry and love and longing with what's her name than you do with me. Be honest."
"I don't," Mark replied without hesitation, "and I never will."
"Exactly! So if you feel more alive with me!" she argued, "How--"
"Alive as in turned on, yes," Mark agreed, "but not more real, not more connected to the real world, to my family, to the news, not more real to myself. At 67, I don't want to get lost in a dream, not even the sexiest, most beautiful dream in the world."
As angular patches of sunlight crept imperceptibly across the hotel rug, the argument continued. Finally Pam fell silent.
"Do you need a ride to the airport," were Mark's last words to her.
"No thanks," were hers to him.
Pam wept her way back to Boston , and even after four or five months had passed, she still cried over Mark at least once a day. Eventually her kind, well-meaning friends told her that it was time to put Mark behind her. "Mark can't match the heat of your passion," they guessed. "He'd rather be comfortable than in love." "You deserve better." "I know there's someone out there for you." --All the old clichés, Pam thought, and cried some more.
Not surprisingly, their advice failed completely. At some level, Pam realized that she didn't want to "get over" Mark any more than she wanted to get over feeling beautiful, smart, and powerful. Nothing in her experience had felt as good as being in love with Mark. "I must NEVER forget him," she told herself at these moments, then added with equal conviction, "But I'm stuck and miserable, I MUST forget him." Don't forget, forget, don't forget--day after day she went back and forth. Men and women without number have known this particularly painful form of paralysis. Some never resolve the dilemma and in the process of slamming back and forth between "forget!" and "never forget!" eventually manage to batter both themselves and the person they once loved into a pulp.Bitterness and cynicism become the only balm they can find for their hearts.
Other lovers put their Mad Marks behind them by explaining why the fault was all his. "This was a great love," they tell themselves, "but look what he did to it. He wasn't responsible, he wasn't 'into me,' he was too self-centered, had no imagination or energy, and . . . . , and all the rest." Of course this strategy of surviving heartbreak eventually fails. When a friend asks, "So why did you fall for this jerk in the first place? You deserve better." Or when another states flatly, "He couldn't have really loved you, or he wouldn't have left," then the great love has been reduced to a great big mistake. If the Pams of the world agree that they have been let down by a weak man, they can indeed go on with their lives, but only as inexperienced and insecure women. What they had thought was a great love and a great person turned out to be altogether different, and they can't trust themselves to distinguish true love from any number of other interactions.
But there are other alternatives. A great love can both be held onto and let go. It's not easy, and it takes time, patience, and faith. In the next story we will see how a woman shakes free of the paralysis, and in the third, we'll watch still another woman figure out what she can hold onto even when the man she shared an impossible love with is gone. Finally, we'll look at the story of Isis and Osiris to see what the wisdom of ancient Egypt has to say about loving, letting go, yet holding onto the harvest of honest heartbreak. |
