Who's the love of your life?
A few years ago, my mom told me the man she dated for several years before her and my dad got together was hers. They lived together for a little bit. She counts their relationship as a marriage. She has 27 more years with my dad under her belt than that guy so why him? She said he was an egotistical asshole. She said she caught him posing and checking himself out in the mirror more than once. That revelation, that a man whose picture I've never even seen and, more importantly, IS NOT MY FUCKING DAD, is the love of my mom's, life has clanged in my brain for years but I think I figured it out.
My mom is not an overly emotional person. I don't mean frigid - if I don't see her for more than a week she texts me with, "I MISS U", followed by a litany of sad emojis - but she's not prone to weeping or losing her temper And maybe that's it. Maybe he made her kinda crazy for a while. I remember how crazy I felt with my first real boyfriend. I was jealous and clingy. When I helped him unpack in his new dorm room, five hours away, I cried so much that his mom mumbled something like "por Dios, mi'jita, ya." Enough already, girl. I can't imagine my mom blubbering over anyone like that but from what she's told me about her unofficial second husband, I don't think he respected her and that must be what unglued her.
A guy I liked many years ago told me about how his parents' happy marriage was fractured by his father's imprisonment. He told me they moved on with their lives but still cried for each other. He typed, "be right back", and went silent for several minutes. I figured he'd left to compose himself. I cried, too, and prayed for the universe to put them back together. How could life be so cruel and unfair to True Love? Surely that kind of devotion would see them reunited someday. We're still waiting, last I checked.
My best friend nipped my initial attraction at a mutual friend in the bud, confiding that he was about to visit his girlfriend, a girl I had recently just met, in Spain.
"Really? They're together?" I asked more surprised than disappointed.
"She's the love of his life," he said. That relationship, which was built on years of close friendship, ended so traumatically for the both of them that they can hardly speak each other's names.
You can love a lot of people in your life, like I have. Or you're in one of those rare, animal kingdom relationships where you've been together since you were kids and half the people that know about it think it's the sweetest romance (you can count me in that category) and the other half are cynical assholes that are sure you're just a couple of codependent dipshits hiding your mutual hatred in the box where you keep your love notes and prom pictures (also me, depending on the day).
I don't know how to answer the question of who the love of my life is because I don't know what qualifies someone for the position and the passage of time inevitably distorts one's perception of past loves for better or worse. I don't know if I'm mistaking jealousy, irrationality, co-dependence, or a list of other pathologies for love. For me, there still exists a gap between wild, passionate, In-Love-love and stable, devoted, Love-love. Maybe not a gap so much as, if the first one works out it cools down into the second one and you just have a boring, comfortable life together.
I am mystified by couples that have stood the test of time and are still wildly in love. I can never seem to get past the 2-year mark without a steady decline of sex and attraction. That's all that In-Love shit is, right? Being drawn to someone so far beyond your control that you have to force yourself not to stare, not to call, to Be Cool so that you don't freak them out with the blinding intensity of your adoration, every tap, comment, text, and Like forming a hydra-headed digital crush beast in the much-lamented age of social media.
Maybe that's what's got me asking in the first place and I'm just another one of the many millennials feeling anxious about romance in the age of WiFi. Our parents probably never got dumped via text so we only have each other to gauge the damage. My mom keeps handwritten love notes my dad wrote her while co-piloting my godfather's little plane over the Bahamas. She never had to suffer the indignity of dick pics in her DMs. A few years ago we were grappling with the question of this online dating shit was even real as happy couples twirled, beamed, and waggled their wedding rings on our TVs during those eHarmony commercials. Today we've resigned ourselves to it, knowing that the next person you fall in love with might have swiped right on your picture while they were taking a shit. How are you supposed to find the love of your life when true romance seems dead?
