The Only Man I’ve Ever Loved
I’ve only ever been in love with one man. He is incredible, one of the greatest humans I’ve ever met. He’s brilliant, he’s funny, he’s done amazing things and tells the best stories. He’s gentle and kind but maintains this old fashion stoicism that gives him an almost Marlin Brando-esque air. He has these piercing blue eyes that look like little Earth’s and strong, scarred hands. I started loving him the moment we met, but I don’t think he realizes.
He’s the quiet type, always keeps his emotions in check, but every once in a while I feel like I get through to him. It’s usually in the car. He’ll be driving me somewhere, and he’ll turn up the radio (he loves 50s music) and he’ll sing. He’ll croon those doo wop love ballads with everything he’s got, for all the world like a real life Romeo singing to his balconied Juliette. I always imagined he was singing those songs to me. But now that it’s been a while, it seems more likely (or more obvious) that he was singing for someone else. It was some beautiful blond of his childhood maybe, or some ephemeral goddess of his future. I think to him, I was always just a kid.
But I loved him. Who am I kidding, I still love him, always will. The scraps of affection he would occasionally and accidentally throw my way are still some of my most precious memories, the thought of impressing him, of winning him, of him seeing me with new eyes presses on me constantly. And when I need to escape from everything, I still listen to those old songs and imagine he’s singing them to me.
I know that I’m hopeless when it comes to him. I’m a smart woman, very smart in fact, I got this way trying to impress him, to become like him, thinking if only I could say something, do something, he might realize how much he’s really loved me all this time. But he hasn’t. All this time. All these years, nothing has changed except me. And that doesn’t even touch my love for him. (Maybe that’s why he doesn’t love me, because my enduring love for him betrays that I’m not as smart as I think.)
He’s hurt me. Not intentionally, but in the careless way that only the object of unrequited love can. He forgets me. He tells me about his affection for others. He is disinterested in my success, in my failures, in me. He betrayed me once, a very long time ago, a deep, biting, irrevocable betrayal, but he’s done right by me since that moment, and somehow, the whole affair only make me love him more, because he could have gone on betraying me forever without diminishing my love for him, but he didn’t. And that was an immense kindness.
By all accounts, this love has me completely undone, and sometimes when I’m lying awake thinking about his life, I wonder if he’s never actually loved anyone. No other idea has caused me such a crushing ache in my heart. And like the truly hopeless lover that I am, my heart doesn’t break admitting to myself that he has probably never loved me, it breaks because I want more than anything for him to have love. More than anything. All I can want for him is to be happy. To love and be loved. It is worse to imagine him going unloved than to know that he will never love me. Exponentially worse.
I’ve always wanted to have that fiber of your being, rip your heart out, everything’s different now kind of love in my life, and I’ve always believed it was worth having, despite the risks. I believed it was worth putting everything on the line for the chance of finding a person to build your life around, someone to build their life around you.
I think we minimize the risk of this chance because we believe that the kind of person brave enough to take it somehow deserves to win, or that these types are so persistent that they’ll keep making the bet until it pays off. But I can’t name a single college dropout who tried to build something in his garage and failed, but went on to some other greatness. Because those people who believe in playing the odds are strong, confident, smart people, and no smart human is immune to doubt. Doubt is heavy, it can be crushing, it tends to lie across your shoulders, weighing down heavier and heavier on not an idea or experience but on you, on everything you are. Eventually it’s all you can do to hold it up, and there is nothing else. Maybe the risks of business and the risks of love aren’t perfect substitutes, but admitting to myself that this love was incomplete has certainly thrown me into the shadow of doubt, and I worry I might be here for a while. Or forever.
My heart wheezes when I go back to that car, to those gentle moments of intimacy when the only man I’ve ever loved revealed his heart to me. It trembles at the thought that maybe he sings to his own unrequited love, maybe he can’t love me because he’s waiting for some other woman to love him first, to love him as much as he loved, loves, will always love, her.
Maybe all of his learning, his education, was to win her love, or maybe he was trying to use the tools of science to understand why he couldn’t. Maybe he thought that knowing why he was unworthy of her love would make that reality more bearable. Maybe the mistakes he’s made were made in hopelessness, in an attempt to show her that he was no fool, hoping that perhaps the key to her love was to stop loving her. Maybe she shattered him so completely that this life is all he’s capable of with what he’s got left. Maybe that’s why he can’t love me, because he looks at me and sees what he himself has become, and can’t help but sneer at my ignorance.
I feel myself becoming like him, becoming distant, cold. But I love him, and that’s so much a part of me that quitting this love would be tantamount to quitting who I am. Maybe I never really had a choice. Maybe this is my destiny. Maybe this emotional dementia is written right into our DNA, mine and his. I believe he sincerely tries to love me, and maybe that’s all there is to it. Perhaps my love is so immense that it can build a bridge across the chasm between us, at least he’ll be looking in my direction.
That’s why he let’s me hear him sing those songs, right? He knows I need something to build the fantasy of our love on, so he drives real slow and he sings what’s on his heart so that I can pretend it’s me. He knows I need it, he knows there’s nothing else he can do for me. And by some miracle, this makes me love him even more.