Learning What Love Isn't
A long time ago, I wrote about the three great loves a person has. (You can still read it here) But if I’m being honest, that was only part of the story. Because I haven’t had three - I’ve had four. And I only told you about three of them back then. I've mentioned the other one here and there in this blog, but honestly... not the whole thing.
The first is the high school love. Sweet, simple, a little bubble of calm in the chaos of adolescence. He was kind, funny, steady. We’re still friendly twenty-seven years later. That relationship taught me something important: not all love has to end in flames. Sometimes, people simply grow in different directions - and that’s okay.
The third (I’ll explain why I’m skipping the second in a minute) was the hard love. The complicated, bruising kind. He was the charming one—the one who knew how to perform affection in public but wielded his words like weapons behind closed doors. He sent flowers every month, not because he wanted to, but because someone before him had and he had to be more impressive. I stayed longer than I should have, clinging to the promise of "I love you" without realizing that his version of love hurt. That relationship didn’t leave physical scars, but the emotional ones took much longer to understand - and even longer to heal.
The fourth is the one you marry or build a life with. The safe one. The one who sees the wreckage and chooses to stay anyway. The one who knows that love isn’t loud gestures or dramatic moments, but quiet constancy. There’s not much I need to say about him—his love spoke for itself.
Which brings me back to the second. (I know these may come in different orders for everyone.) He’s the one I kept mostly to myself. As Rose said in Titanic, “A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.” And he was one of mine. A boxer from a big Irish family. Wild, magnetic, unpredictable (mostly in a good way). We laughed a lot, argued often, and never quite figured each other out. Well, I never really figured him out. I was 21 and romanticizing everything - trying to script a love story that felt worth writing about instead of being grateful for the one that was unfolding. My biggest problem was always looking for something more instead of realizing I had more than enough already.
The thing about novel-worthy romances? They rarely translate well into real life.
Looking back now, I feel for him. I was a lot - stubborn, idealistic, messy in the ways young women who don’t know how to love yet often are. I was not a great companion. Years ago, he found my blog and sent me an email. I didn’t see it until about three years after he sent it, buried in my spam folder. One line stayed with me:
"In 2000 you were my world but I realized you were in love with being in love and not in love with me.”
Oof. That landed hard.
And… he wasn’t wrong. Not entirely, at least. I think I always wanted to love him the right way. I even believed I did at the time. But when I sat with his words nearly 19 years after we parted ways, I had to admit the truth underneath them: I didn’t know how to love someone well then. Not in the way he needed or deserved. And realizing that someone who once meant so much to me walked away feeling unloved? That cracked something open in me. For a long time, I blamed him. I sought to remember the bad times because if I remembered anything else, our downfall would have been my fault.
Only, it was my fault. Because I realized, I am one of those loves that taught him what love isn’t.
We exchanged a few emails. He was gracious and reminded me of the great times. I fumbled through the conversation, of course, because I'm awkward and uncomfortable in most situations. It’s one of those late-night regrets that still sneaks up at 2 a.m. - the kind where you groan into your pillow and ask yourself, Why did I say that? Which is what happened to me last night and led to me writing about it today.
What I should have said to him is:
I’m sorry. I’m sorry you didn’t feel loved. Please know that at the time, I did love you very much in the way my heart was capable of. It may not have looked like love, I realize. Maybe it got lost in my storytelling, in my dreaming, in my own immaturity - but it was there. I locked your memory away because losing you felt like failure - my failure - and I didn’t want to share that with the world. I was too caught up chasing the idea of a fairytale to realize I was already living a story worth fighting for at the time. I hope you're doing well. I hope your life is full and joyful. And maybe someday - on a crowded Chicago sidewalk or some unexpected corner of the world - I’ll see you again. Maybe we’ll smile and laugh at how young and ridiculous we were and I can say I'm sorry in person before we go off again on our different paths to the rest of our lives with just the memories of some good times from way back when. (But keep in mind, I'll probably say something off the wall because I get nervous and that's just who I am, lol).
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll feel the softest peace in knowing you forgive me.
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