Life History – Romantic Ponderings

Does anyone ever really forget a lost love?

As I age, I realize that I’ve logged in a lot of relationships over a relatively short span of time. All seemingly characterized by intense, fiery trajectories that ultimately end in the same way – burnout. That and I have a long string of “potential relationships that never were.” I find that I think about both types with the same frequency, which leads me to the question of whether or not everyone lives with a certain amount of remebrance or nostalgia about people they once used to know.

Now I once said, quite accurately I believe, that I am already nostalgic about the future. Meaning that I almost never appreciate anyone or anything until they are a mere speck on my rearview mirror. Why this is, I have never really figured out. Unless of course it’s always been about the all-too-human ability to erase “reality” and install it with a filtered version of “what we like to remember.”

For the life of me, I can’t remember why I ever broke up with Joe. Except for timing. Bad timing. Now for certain, Becky, my best friend at the time, would tell you categorically that there were many other, bigger, reasons for our relationship’s demise. For one, he was a devout Catholic and I had had – gasp! – more than 3 sexual partners by the tender age of 20. To him, three was the acceptable number. I lied through my teeth and doubled that for 6, still a drastic lowball of the actual number. When I finally told him the truth, it forever discolored who I was for him. To this day, he’s still teaching at the same school – not 20 minutes from where we grew up – and probably thinks I’m the biggest slut in the world. Sometimes I wonder if he ever remembers me at all, or when and if he does, if he thinks nice things or rather uncomplimentary things.

But, as we are all wont to do, I have replaced the “Joe” I knew for an idealistic version of “Joe,” one that I might have married and had kids with.

Sometimes I also go back through the men I’ve known and try to picture myself married to them. I do this even with the gay men I know – heaven only knows why. I think maybe it’s because I’m trying to vanquish the thought of a “perfect” person out there, surreptitiously placed in my subconcious by all the damn media images I used to swallow whole as a child and teenager. That in the end, relationships really are about work.

I had a semi-revelatory moment the other night on the town with my new Korean and Japanese girlfriends. The Korean, at one year younger than me, has already been married and divorced. Now she is in another relationship with a man much older than her and she is hesitant to make another mistake. But she also told me that she has learned a thing or two through her divorce – that even if it was a good idea to marry someone, you might find out it’s not a good idea to stay married to them forever. That we all change and the person you married 10 years ago might look basically the same, but be forever different. And then what? What if you don’t love them anymore? What if they drive you crazy? What then?

So maybe marriage isn’t the best idea for people in the modern age. After all, 100 years ago marriages didn’t last all that long due to early death rates. Now we are all staring down maybe 50 years with the same person doing the same annoying things to drive you insane. Or doing the same things you love. Probably a mixture of the two.

Occasionally, I still have dreams where I am reunited with past loves. We’re dating again and I’m happy this time around, everything is near perfect. And then, sometimes, I have dreams about people I’ve loved from afar and we finally, miraculously, get it together and it’s just how I imagined it to be – good and bad. And then, of course, I have the stray odd dream where I’m dating Ashton Kuschner or the blond kid from cheesy show One Tree Hill.

Hell, once I even dreamed about dating Tony Curtis. But before you call the sanatorium, don’t worry, it was the 1950s version.

I guess that in the end, the fantasy really is better than the reality. The men I still love the most are those that were close to me but that I never had the chance to be intimate with – go figure. And the men that were pure fantasy to begin with.