Unrequited Love Blog

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…I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.  Probably at some point, it’s not that big of a town.  How will I feel?  How will she feel?  Will she be nice to me and I’ll feel nervous and condescended to?  I wonder how her life is going, how her career is going…Is she pregnant yet?  Is she happy?  Will she seem more “grown up” to me?  Has she thought of me at all?  I still think about her way too often.  Why why why?  I”m such an idiot.  Why did I become so obvious with my attraction?  Why did I fall in love with her?  Why won’t she love me back?  Was she even tempted?  Is her husband an asshole?  Probably not, but he is probably not as bright (as her, as me).  Does he earn a lot of money?  Fuck him.  I hate him.  Why can’t she be attracted to me?  Why can’t I be talking to her, learning about her thoughts and feelings, living with her?  I wonder if the sex they have is good…Maybe he sucks.  But probably not.  Maybe she wants to fuck him in the ass, and he doesn’t really want to, but he does it to please her.  And then he really doesn’t like it, and hates being submissive, but she really likes it, and makes him do it often!  Haha!  Why, why, why was I such an idiot around her in that last class?  So embarrassed… ….Why can’t I get what I want for once?  How come she doesn’t see me as attractive?    She’s moving on with her life and has forgotten all about me, and I’m pathetically still focused on her…Shit, shit, shit…

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The post title is a reference to the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow, where the film follows two separate plot lines for the same life, depending on whether Gwyneth makes a train or the door slides shut in front of her.  I’ve been thinking on and off about what it might have been like for Jessica to have been with me rather than her husband.  Now I know she wasn’t interested and it was never going to happen, but if we could all just agree to suspend our disbelief for a while, here we go…

I think about her being Catholic, how she would never have been able to have the wedding she may have dreamt about since she was a child.  I wonder if her faith combined with being in a same-sex relationship would have been a struggle for her, for her parents and siblings, for her extended community.  That kind of thing can be very subtle, people (especially Catholics, in my opinion) can be very capable of lovingly accepting homosexuality in others but never in themselves or close loved ones, it would be felt to be a compromise.  If she had been with me, would I have been taking her away from her community in a subtle but devastating way?

I will never make the kind of money most well-educated men seem to make.  I seem to top out at around $70K.  In my area, it’s lower middle-class liveable, nothing more.  I would not have been able to offer a large house in the suburbs, expensive vacations, a certain level of comfortable respectability, or stay-at-home motherhood.

This is really what has been on my mind, more fundamentally.  How could I consider taking children away from her?  Sure, children can be adopted or test-tubed, but they would not be our children.  And I don’t think we could afford for her to stay home with them.  More importantly, they (Jessica and any children) would not be wrapped in the warmth of heterosexual privilege, of unquestioned approval and support, all those subtle messages saying they are doing the right thing, socially and spiritually.  With me, would she be lonely, unhappy, feel vulnerable?  At some deep level feel the life she had was somehow less than? I mean, I’m pretty sure she wants kids, and how could I possibly deny her that, in its fullest form?  I have a picture of the child of my Spouse’s friend, the baby happens to have Jessica’s hair color and eye color.  He is such a beautiful child, how could I even think of taking such a child away from Jessica?

I know I gravitate toward biological explanations for social behavior, I know this about myself.  I can’t help but feel that people are supposed to pair-bond, to mate and make babies together, to create a family.  That the family is the place from which we intertwine with the world, and the place from which we defend against it.  And I wouldn’t want Jessica to have anything less than this Eden-before-the-fall, this enduring fable.

The life I could have offered her may not have been the life she deserved.  I wouldn’t want her to have to compromise her faith, or question its integrity.  I wouldn’t want her to have to struggle for money or feel she had to leave her child in the care of well-meaning strangers.  I wouldn’t want her and her child to ever feel they didn’t belong.

*Door slides shut, she’s gone.*

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It occurs to me that there is no such thing as second place, or even a consolation prize, in love — you either win or you lose.  Even if you develop or maintain a friendship, unless you fall completely out of love with the person, friendship surely does not fill the space in your soul that Love had tenderly and hopefully created.

I have fantasies of friendship with Jessica, but there is always something else going on in the relationship.  The fantasy tends to run like we’re friends but she’s unhappy or unfulfilled in her marriage and slowly falls in love with me.  There is unremarked sexual tension, lots of sunlight, she likes my huge protective dog (which is a love-worthy feat all on its own, believe me), she hangs out in my condo a lot (nice, clean condo with dishwasher and attractive decor for those who have been reading this blog earlier), we talk a lot and get to know each other.

Sometimes the fantasy ends with Jessica being unwilling or unable to leave her husband, and I’m miserable.  Or she does leave and it’s a huge drama with hurt feelings (husband, parents) and anger (parents).  Either way, I either win or lose, but no consolation prize, I can’t maintain a consolation prize fantasy.

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Christ,  I am horny.  I just went online to craigslist looking for easy sex, with a man cause they are so much easier than women, and I started emailing back from an address that revealed my name, because I was in such a hurry to get laid. 

Spouse is refusing to let me out of marriage right now.  She wants me to support her through school, another year or so.  I don’t think I can make it!  She said I could have sex with others, since we are not married anymore, but then I am supposed to financially support her?  WTF!?  I think I must be retaliating.  Saga of a bad marriage.  Saga of a less-than-fully-conscious deprived romantic.

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Well, it seemed so to me.  I don’t know what else to call it.  I stuttered in front of Jessica, couldn’t think, got confused, blushed, kept trying to ignore her but couldn’t stop staring at her, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, lost weight, thought about Jessica incessantly, had incredibly powerful and preoccupying sexual & emotional fantasies, went around buoyant or high on love for quite a while (intermittantly tempered with grief and despair), demonstrated poor judgement (sort of made a pass at her when she was straight, engaged, and a recently former student).

I suppose you could call all this stuff a crush, not love. Especially considering how little contact I actually had with her, how limited our interactions were.

However, the fact that it’s gone on so long (about 18 months for the physical symptoms and the emotional stuff still continues), and how strong my feelings have been, and how it’s lead me to make major changes in my life (get a divorce, return to the city, rethink what I’m looking for in a relationship), all this makes me think it was more love than crush.  Unrequited love.

The danger in calling a crush “love” is in giving it too much weight, too much impact on your self-esteem, on your ability to see available others as attractive, too much emphasis on over-interpreting fantasy.  However, there are also dangers in refusing to recognize love when it is there.  It’s emotionally dangerous to deny such an important emotion as romantic love when it happens to you because you’re too intellectually focused to feel it, or because you can’t risk the shame of acknowledging it if the love is not returned, or because it seems unacceptable or unwanted in some way.  This kind of emotional tyranny may result in a pretty narrow life.  Which is just what I’m trying to avoid.  I’m trying to move away from making conventional choices simply because that’s what others say we should do, trying to move away from filtering emotions through a maturely reasoned set of accepted worldviews.  I suppose this is at least one reason why I call my feelings for Jessica love, and not a crush.

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