True Love

I’ve been in Love, capital L, romantic, intimate Love, two times in my life.  The second time, lucky for me, is with my husband.   It’s a Love that has most definitely stood the many tests of time.

The first time I fell in love though, I was 16.  I met this guy, I’ll call him D, through mutual friends and it was most definitely obsession at first sight.  We had a short, intense, and fiery love affair, as much as 16 year olds can carry out such a thing.  Later we discovered that neither of us had clear recollections of our first encounter, we both just had this sense of being hit with a mack truck of intensity and connection.   D and I became inseparable almost immediately, connecting mentally, and emotionally, and sexually in an amazing and overwhelming way. Shortly into our relationship, like days after we had sex for the first time, we were exchanging I love you’s….and D was saying things to me along the lines of:  he didn't deserve me, I was too good for him, his love for me was scary, etc.  He repeated statements like these many times during our relationship. I was very calm and mellow with him when he would say these things to me, telling him that I knew who he was, good and not, and he was someone I loved and wanted to be with.  And when he started talking about us being married– I was able to tell him not to look so far into the future – we were both not even 17 at that point.  I knew that we were not ready to even be talking about that stuff, even though I was head over heels about him. As it turned out, I was right.  The love affair lasted only months because what he did with his feelings for me was to destroy the relationship and thoroughly break my heart.  He did this because he didn’t know what to do with the intensity of his feelings towards me; I knew that even then.  He was generally a self-destructive type, very intelligent with a creative way of lacking insight and good judgment in general.  I was good at finding those back then.

I said all that to say this:  I’ve been in a relationship with a lady who told me throughout the time that we’ve been together that she didn’t know what to do with her feelings about me, she was worried about her feelings for me, I made her nervous and she didn’t know what to do with me.   And I was fairly infatuated with her myself, developing a friendship, starting to really care about her – so I stuck in there with her, enjoying her company and her smarts, and her sexiness, reassuring her where I could…

Sounding familiar?  Yeah. 

Can you guess the outcome yet? Yeah. 
Dial down the intensity by half and replace the 16 year old first Love with a 30+ year old major Crush/affection…and there you have it.  Can I just tell you that while my heart is not broken (though I feel very hurt), - this situation is no fun the second time around either.

Note to self….
If someone tells me they don’t know what to do with me – I should take their word for it.  They’re telling the truth and shouldn’t be entrusted with my feelings, because they really don’t know what to do with them.  Even though I don’t want to hear it, and don’t want to believe it…it’s true.