Why do we love who we love

Last week i went out to dinner with 'Romeo'. We had a great time - until he realized he was having a great time, and then yet again started going over 'why it wouldn't work'. Yet again, he asked me how he hurt me, how I could have loved him - etc...

Not to be unkind, but I didn't think he was really smart enough to understand anything I would have to say on this matter... or perhaps he is deliberately stupid, or maybe he just feels confused, guilty, conflicted --- I have no idea. Nor, honestly, do I really care any more. I did my best. It didn't work out. Life and love are like this.

But - the question is important. Why do we love who we love? Why do I love who I love?

At one time, I would pathologize these questions. "I only love unavailable men because I am too afraid to love someone available" or "I loved him because I was an abused child, and was looking for someone to take care of me" - or any number of other pathological reasons that make my choices wrong.

We assume that if we get hurt it is because we have done something wrong, or because someone else has wronged us. But, as I have said before, to love is always to suffer a broken heart, and always - if you love someone, you WILL get hurt. It is the nature of caring - opening your heart makes you vulnerable to others words and deeds, and we are all imperfect and we do hurt each other all the time.

In my frustration at Ale asking me this question yet again, I started thinking more deeply about this question. What is it that pushes us to make the choices we make - for I contend that love is always a choice, whether we do it consciously or unconsciously.

I have loved a lot of people over my lifetime - I have thought myself "in love" a score of times (many times to have it simply vanish like a ghost) - and I have been really truely profoundly in love 5 times in my life.

First I was 14 or so, and his name was Fred. Fred was 4 years older than me, already showing some signs of what would become schizophrenia - and to my adolescent mind, he was the most exotic thing in the whole wide world. Fred was a lot boy, but I saw him as a man. He initiated me into sex and love and fast cars. He gave me a view of a world beyond - of college, of escape - of a world beyond Kenosha Wisconsin and the violence of the world I was in. He would come, he would run off again; there was never a relationship there - but there was a friendship (as the years would prove.....) he represented my yearning for a world beyond and gave me the confidence that I would have a life beyond what I could see. He was like Hades, dragging me periodically into the underworld, and showing me a river I would someday cross. He was Orpheus to my Eurydice. I owe my life as it is now to him, and will forever be greatful.

Then, there was John. I met him when I was 14 or 15. This was my first 'True Love'. This was the teen romance, the innocent love as it should have been. It was Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde. It was proms and flowers and making out in the back seat of the car. He loved me with his whole heart, and I loved him with mine. I do not know that I have, to this day, really ever recovered from that break-up. This was what love was supposed to be - innocent and pure and just like the storybooks say. It ended as teen romances are meant to end... and in some ways, this remains an outstanding tragedy in my life - because this was the only time, in my whole life - where I was in love and loved in equal measure. This is really the only love who loved me back before it was too late.

Then there was Nick. I met him when I was 19 or 20, and hated him - and often think perhaps I should have followed my first instinct and stayed as far away as I could, but there are love stories and there are love stories. I fell in love, hard, on our first date. He was a bad boy - the worst. He was lost beyond redemption. He was sex incarnate, and I imagined him older and wiser and imbued him with qualities he didn't own - but being who he was, he tried to be those things. He left me heartbroken, shattered, destroyed - but I won him back. I knew - I KNEW we were fated to be together. I knew I would marry him, I knew I would have his child. We had Karmic business together, and we played it through. We made a home, we raised other people children, we gathered a family and eventually had a child of our own. At which point he left me - as my dreams always told me he would. Our life together was a mythic journey - I went from Maiden to Wife with him, and the loss of the marriage was a true death for me.

In the midst of this was Curtis. Curtis is a gay man, whom I met in college, and he was the friend of my heart. He was my brother, my soul mate, the one I would turn to for each and every little thing. Obviously, this wasnt a sexual relationship - but my love for him was wild. He was the twin child seperated from me at my birth, and the only person in my life who I have ever truly lost. I still dream of him, of reconcilliation and restoration, but he has spun off into a different galaxy now - but if there is another life, I have confidence he will be my true brother again and we will find each other throughout eternity.

Finally - there is Ale - (or as a friend of mine likes to call him - 'Romeo'). Now, I don't quite know, yet, what this was all about. Ale is something completely different for me. Before him, all the men I loved or were in love with had some things in common; well read, artistic tempraments, outsiders or nerds - all were extremely deep and complicated. Ale was like dating the high school football captain. He is a BOY. Always a little out of reach, but when I was with him, he was so sweet - so affectionate and loving, open like a child. And then, like a young teen running away from mother, he was gone again. It was maddening, painful, like high school. Yet my soul knew him, and loved him, and wanted him desperately. He changed me, bringing out in me a sweetness and childlikeness and innocence that I had renounced long ago. I liked who I was when I was with him (when I say WITH him, I speak of being in the same room - because somehow, when I was out of sight, I was out of mind with him....).

For all the unlikeliness of this relationship, for all that his lack of maturity and depth doomed this from the beginning - my body knew. And I do not disrespect my bodies response to love. His body knew too - but he is too young and too unformed to really understand what that means to the soul - and he is too young and too unformed to actually HAVE much soul yet. He is like Narcissus, or Peter Pan - and no great suffering has yet grasped him deeply enough to propel him into the maturity that is needed for real love.

Something mythical played out in this relationship - Puer / Puella or Puer / Great Mother - or perhaps some of both. I do not think I loved him only because I couldn't have him - though this would be the pop psych version of the story. This love was an initiation of sorts, the last love of my girlhood, the love that has propelled me finally and permanantly into adult hood. My innocence is now truly gone, and it has made me far more worldly. I am no longer naive. His love of me and his rejection of that love has changed me. Not for the better, not for the worse, but into something deeper and far more profound than I was before.

This story is not yet finished. But really, none of these stories is finished. The have, for better or worse, formed me, created me, made me what I am. In the midst of all the anger, pain, sorrow and loss - love remains in all cases, and it is these loves that have formed my soul.

I am trying to learn gratitude for these gifts of love, and sometimes - when I am not feeling overwhelmed, frightened, and alone... I grasp how lucky I am and I count not only these 'great loves' - but all the other loves I have had - and I can remember that I am not, nor have I ever been, alone.

Each of these loves, great and small - have fulfilled a portion of my destiny. Each of them has taken its own mythical position in my lifes journy - these men have been my fathers, my gods, by sons and my brothers. To them I have been wife, daughter, sister, whore, and goddess by turns. Each person we love creates us, develops our soul, our psyche, and creates the mythos that is our life.

Perhaps one day I will find what it is that I most want; a companion for my life, a companion of my soul - someone who will oversee my final death and walk me over the river. Someone who would be willing to go to the underworld with me, or will be there when I arrive. In the meantime, I think I must be content to wander, feeling alone - keeping my heart open in the face of that lonliness and trusting that my myth isnt quite completed.

Death Dreams

The other night I had a dream that I am still trying to sit with. Hopefully, in this retelling I won't add or take away much -

In this dream I was dying of 3 types of cancer... all in my torso. I cannot remember which organs were affected -

I kissed Spike and Betta goodbye, and I went off to find someone to help me die. Eventually, I collapsed in pain on the floor of a bar, and someone offered to give me an overdose of painkillers. I motioned to him to give me enough to kill my pain, but not to kill me. He gave me an injection in my right index finger, and went away.

Again I wandered off to find help - but I could not find any. I talked to someone at a boat dock, and he couldnt help me, I wandered off some more, and tried making phone calls, but I could not reach anyone. All I wanted was someone to sit with me and comfort me while I died.

Then, I realized I was already dead. I could smell it, I could taste it... and I began vomiting up my intestines, my insides were melted and coming out of my mouth, and I could feel pieces of stomach as I vomited. I recall that the vomiting was incredibly painful....

When I finished vomiting, I again tried to contact people to come help me. I called my brother, but he wouldnt take my call, and I didnt know who else to call or where to turn.

Then, I was crossing a bridge (or maybe it was a barge?) - and I was looking down at my friend Amy's house - I was elevated, though not so high... and I recalled that I had rehearsal the next day, and that I needed to be there, so I decided that I couldn't be dead, and since no one would help me die I might as well be alive.

My last thought before waking was that no one lives through this kind of cancer... and then I woke up.

I began to cry, because there was no one there to sit with me who would be with me as I die.