How many times have I written about this subject? How many more times will I write about it? Who can say? I never get tired of it. Soon it will be Valentine’s Day, one of my favorite days of the year, so rest assured you’ll be getting one of these love letters to Love itself at least once a year as long as I live and breathe. For whenever February hits–this month of groundhogs, Presidents, black history, my (former) wedding anniversary (14th would have been tomorrow), and of course, Valentine’s Day–I always get love on the brain. What can I say? Single or attached, Ah just lurrrve Lurve!
Love is all around us. People are obsessed with love. Searching for it. Finding it. Keeping it. Losing it. Searching for it again. But all this preoccupation with love begs the question:
What do you think when you think about love?
Here’s what I think.
I think love is the epitome of the human experience. Love is the purest, most powerful, most compelling emotion there is. It is the source of the greatest of human achievements, from birth to motherhood to donating a kidney to saving a stranger’s life to risking death to walk on the moon. Love impels us to reach the highest of the highs and accomplish the hard and impossible. To survive the hard and impossible. When I think about love I think it literally is the best we can do while we are here. Love tests us all because the flip side of love is fear, the other base emotion we all share. All human emotion–anger, joy, sadness, anxiety, disgust, hope, courage, fury, jealousy, and excitement–is rooted in one of these two, core feelings. Love is the yin to fear’s yang. If fear is weakness and embodies the negative, the primal and reactive lizard brain, love is strength and embodies the positive, the ethereal, self-aware, and multi-dimensional mind that perceives beyond this world to a reality where only perfect love exists and fear does not. Love challenges us to overcome fear, to live this life fearlessly and vulnerably, open to whatever may come in spite of our painful past.
And yet, I think that when we love someone…. truly love them… love and fear are inextricably intertwined. Because when you really love someone, the fear of losing them to the vagaries of life–boredom, financial ruin, allure for another, the dictates of human drives and preferences–or in the “best” case, to illness or death, is ever-present. Fear is a shadow lurking in the dank basement of every loving relationship. To love someone is to live with this fear, the fear that one day you will have to live without them, the fear that one day you will have to live with the absence of their love for you and your love for them.
This poem captures this duality perfectly:
When I think about love, I think that love is a beautiful thing, a holy thing. But it’s also a fearful thing and a thing for fools. I’ve been a fool for love many times, and this is a subject I write about often. To remember someone with whom I’ve shared a life, whose laugh once lifted me, whose word was once a gift to me, brings painful joy indeed.
When I think about love, I think that I have been fortunate to have experienced love in so many diverse ways with different people. My parents, my grandparents, my sisters, my cousins, my nieces and nephews, select friends, my daughter, and yes, my share of women. Although I’ll never experience a one of a kind, decades-long, until-death-do-us-part type of love with one person, I have been blessed to experience what many never get to experience: romantic love in diverse forms, varieties, and expressions with multiple people who were unique in their own way and who taught me so much about love, life, human connection, and myself. Not everyone gets to experience this.
Of course, the devil’s advocate lawyer in me wants to argue that this was only possible due to failure, the failing of these relationships and my own personal failings. But I don’t agree with this or think this way. No one knows the true purpose of a human life or the reasons why we cross paths with the people we encounter in it. No one knows what “failure” really is. You don’t win a prize when you die because you experienced a 40-year relationship with one person instead of several shorter ones with different people, or instead of never having one at all. Are Buddhist monks failures or the most enlightened and evolved people on the planet?
What I do know is that I have learned, grown, and evolved in my life due to the form it has taken, the path I have chosen, and the singular women with whom I’ve shared loving relationships. To me, this is success not failure.
When I think about love, I think of the protagonist in Blue Ruin, a book I just finished about a former artist who falls on hard times. He runs into an ex-girlfriend (Alice) when he’s delivering Instacart to her New York mansion during COVID. Twenty years before, Alice ran off with one of his friends, another artist, and he never saw her or them again. He rings her doorbell with his mask on, Alice answers with her mask on, and drama ensues. In my favorite paragraphs in the book, he says:
It’s a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives–human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood. I’d always had goals, even if they weren’t the ones that other people could understand, but at some point I’d lost touch with the person who’d set them. If you had asked me what I was doing, delivering groceries in upstate New York, I would only have been able to give you a superficial answer. (p. 25)
Years later, long after the time when I knew Alice, when I was closer to the man delivering her groceries than the self-conscious boy at the restaurant table, I began to understand that we slip from one life to another without even realizing. There are breaks, moments of transition when we leave behind not just places or times, but whole forms of existence, worlds to which we can never return. (p. 50)
Indeed, we are less continuous than we pretend. We experience “jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood” throughout our lives, and due to this constant renewal and evolution of self, our selves can manifest differently in every relationship, or in one relationship over time.
So when I think about love, I think of the different Selves I have been throughout my life, the different Selves I was with each of the women with whom I shared a relationship. Young me. Idealistic me. Full head of hair me. Workaholic me. Restless and wanderlust me. Infatuated, pining, and obsessive me. Disappointed me. Unsure me. Middle-aged me. Jaded me. Trapped me. Thirsty me. Blind and delusional me. These are the different Selves I presented to the women with whom I’ve shared a relationship. Me but not ME. Each of these Selves was merely one version of me. An undeveloped zygote. A work in progress.
When I think about love, I think of how all of these women are strangers to me now even though I am still in contact with some of them, including Ex., obviously. We’re strangers because I am not the same person I was when I was with them, and they are not the same people they were when they were with me. Most of them are married or in long-term relationships now. Some have kids. Some do not. Some have lost parents I knew. I have lost a parent they knew. We have lived entire lives, sometimes two or three different lives, since we were together. We only knew versions of each other during the brief moments in time we shared as intimates. Now those moments are fading Polaroid snapshots relegated to a dusty album on our minds’ bookshelf. We have slipped from one life to another, into multiple lives and different versions of ourselves, without even realizing. We have left behind places and times and “whole forms of existence, worlds to which we can never return.” We are not the people we knew, and we never will be again.
When I think of these women now–these special women who are unique to me and my life–about the time we knew each other so intimately, about our relationships together, however long they lasted, I become the narrator of this song by the Waterboys:
So…. this Valentine’s Day 2025, I’m sending my love, my gratitude, and a bang on the ear to each of these women who shared a chapter, a page, or a paragraph of life with me and impacted the course of my life in a profound way:
- R., originator of romantic love with all its bittersweet angst in the soul of an 11 year-old boy. Benefactor of his first kiss and introduction to longing, wistfulness, and physical desire, innocent though they were at the time. Juliet to his Romeo, though he was the one standing on the balcony. If the internet and email had existed in 1979 or 1984, what might have been different between you?
- C., co-creator of a teenager’s first serious relationship. Taker of his virginity and provider of virtually every sexual first. A young and inexperienced love that was pure and true. First teacher of what it feels like when someone loves you more than you love them. Bearer of his infidelity. Illustrator of the immense pain it causes another, a lesson he was taught once and never needed to learn again.
- K., architect of a young man’s first infatuation and the depths of angst that are induced through absence and distance. Sexual adventurer and co-explorer. First karmic boomerang. First teacher of disloyalty, betrayal, and heartbreak, the last of which he eventually reciprocated, and the lesson that geographic distance, timing, and life circumstances make the possible impossible.
- S., a slowly gathering storm who became a tornado of desire and borderline obsession for a young man who was too sex-blind to perceive that her last name and cheating on a boyfriend to be with him were comically literal evidence that she was a banana peel sitting on an oil slick covering black ice. First arm candy. Second karmic boomerang. Professor of deception, capriciousness, treachery, and the hard lesson that you never truly know a person.
- J., a magnetic beacon who lit up a room and spawned an immature, jealous attachment in a young man that was disproportionate to the brief duration of the relationship. A mismatch that continued long after the relationship ended, when he once again participated in the betrayal of another to validate himself and attempt a ‘do-over.’ Witnessing the two of you exit a midtown hotel elevator the night before the bar exam was quite suboptimal. First teacher that mismatched or not, strands of attraction can transcend decades of time.
- T. & L., professors of incompatibility and the lesson that when a man is not ready for an exclusive relationship, whether he realizes it or not, the weight of obligation, too many needs, and inharmonious personalities is too much to bear. First teachers of the truism that good, or even great sex does not trump a great connection.
- H., authentic, consistent, and honest. Provider of intense physical attraction and volcanic sex. All in when he wasn’t. Co-author of a failure that pressed a man in his mid-30s into therapy for the first time. Teacher that there is a certain level of emotional depth he needs to reach with someone or it’s not worth it, and the risk of loving someone more than they love you is worth it because the other path is empty, barren, and worse than the risk of a broken heart. Seeing you fulfilled with the true love of your life and a son who is blossoming into a young man always brings a smile to my face.
- E./XX, an exquisite mirage to a parched rover who thought he found an oasis. Teacher of what is possible for him in a relationship. How much devotion he can feel for someone. How he can have so many things he wants in one person but not everything, or the most important things. Teacher of how many signs a relationship is not built to last he is capable of ignoring, how actions and timing matter more than words and intermittent feelings, and how when someone really loves and values you, the only planet alignments they’re interested in are the ones you create together. Catalyst for so much learning and growth that a middle-aged man still needed to acquire. Unwitting restorer of his value and self-worth and his detachment of both from everyone else.
- A./Ex., co-author of my most significant relationship to date. My greatest teacher of too many lessons to name. How quickly and shockingly a relationship can sour, how much unconscious baggage we carry from one relationship to the next, how significant one’s childhood is in how we relate to another, and the interplay of the unconscious mind in communication. I see clearly now that we were doomed from the start, a victim of our incompatible childhoods, unintentionally triggering communication styles, and conflict aversion. Our marriage was a slow-moving car accident that we couldn’t stop. The home I made with you became a house of pain/It started out as husband and wife and ended up in tears. We both deserved better, should have done better with what we had to work with, but we didn’t. You are a wonderful mother to our daughter, and I’m grateful for everything you have taught me. I’m glad that we’re friends now. I think we have more to learn from each other.
When I think about love, I think about my best and worst moments with these women. Stolen moments in parked cars, an empty law school classroom, the top floor of my college campus center on graduation day, beaches at dusk, and a jet ski parked lakeside. Heart-palpitating first kisses in a doorway behind an Italian apartment building. Looking down from my grandmother’s balcony at night, hoping for a black-haired girl to appear on her patio across the street. My heart leaping when she did. Looking across the Piscataqua River to my dead father’s shipyard on a sultry August night, with a full moon rising and a bottle of champagne in my hand. Primal sex during two visits to Venice and the disappointment of involuntary celibacy on a third. Laughing uncontrollably in an elevator thanks to a shared joint. Flirting over ping-pong in a Long Beach pool hall and my first sighting of red lingerie. Arguments in Puerto Rico, Utah, Florida, Venice, Tuscany, the Dominican Republic, and Ward Mountain. Locking someone out of my bedroom, refusing to talk to her, and making her drive home to Long Island because I got drunk and jealous at a law school party. A fairytale first meeting on a Boston rooftop. Driving six hours from New Hampshire to New Jersey in a blinding snowstorm to see someone I missed. Driving six hours from New York to Pittsburgh during COVID to see someone I missed. Pedaling away from that someone like a jackass because I got annoyed about something stupid. Leaving a backpack full of books next to a tree to go have sex on a college football field and discovering it stolen afterwards. Listening to a mixtape made especially for me while pining for that someone on my first visit to Paris. The break-up letter I wrote to her from California a year and a half later. Desperate late night phone calls to her replacement, who pretended she didn’t know me because her backdoor man was visiting. An Ex.-generated birthday party on a Williamsburg rooftop with my entire family, one of the best I ever had. My wedding day, the best party of my life, with everyone I love gathered in one place and music I chose myself. Involuntary celibacy (again) on my honeymoon in Turks & Caicos. Holding her hand on the airplane that carried us and our 8-day-old daughter home from Arizona. Four days of tears in my eyes during a dismal vacation in the DR when I came to the realization that we were unsalvageable, and our marriage was over.
My relationships with these women were experienced by entirely different people. People who no longer exist. Most of these relationships ended well. I don’t believe any of these women would slap me in the face if they saw me. No, I believe the sudden placement of most of them in front of me would lead to nostalgic and joyful reminiscence about our shared experience, the things we’ve learned since we were together, and expressions of mutual appreciation and gratitude for our shared history. Maybe a few ‘I’m sorrys.’ This has already happened with a few of them, in fact. A small minority of these relationships ended badly. There are a couple of women on that list who I prefer never to see again.
Regardless, I love all of them in my own way, a nostalgic and biographically grateful way. I love them for the experiences we shared together, both good and bad, what they made me feel, both good and bad, and what they taught me, both good and bad. How they led me to grow, change, and evolve as a person. How I would not be the man I am today without my experience with each of them. How each of these women is a unique part of my life’s fabric. How they helped create for me a life well-lived and emotions well-felt.
My experience of romantic love has been rich, deep, diverse, intense, and often painful. But romantic love is not all that I think about when I think about love.
When I think of love, I think of my daughter and the boundless and yet fearful love I have for her, the purest and most selfless love I have experienced or ever will experience. Before M., I never could have understood this feeling, the depths of it, the layers upon layers of unconditional devotion for another that are attainable through parenthood. My mother always says ‘There’s no love like the love you have for your children.’ She’s right. The parenthood version of love is powerful, protective, and fucking fierce. Your emotional investment begins at birth, with caring for this tiny helpless thing that can’t survive without you. The feedings and swaddlings and diaper changings at ungodly hours, the sleeplessness for 2 years, sometimes longer, the bathing and potty training and teaching to talk and walk. The indescribable experience of watching this tiny human being grow, evolve, and blossom from a small infant the size of my forearm to a wandering, semi-independent toddler, to a kid learning hard social lessons and acquiring her own thoughts and personality, to this emotionally layered, curious, empathetic, questioning, perceptive, funny, independent, but also still dependent, but also wanting-to-experience-everything-as-soon-as-possible, but also upset when unanticipated things I tried to warn her about happen, but also resilient as hell 11 year-old tweener. It brings me so much joy to guide and teach her and introduce her to new things in life and to support her in every way possible. This unconditional love also brings me fear and anxiety. I worry about her well-being, her abandonment by friends, about whether drugs will ever tempt her, her body self-image, her response to budding attraction to and from boys, too much screen time, who the fuck she’s talking to and what she and they are saying when I’m not around, nightmares of what can happen when she’s alone, projecting too far into the future.
This version of love is like wearing every sensitive organ on the outside of my body on a daily basis. No one could have made me understand this kind of love before I became a father. Had I never become a father–and for a long time, this seemed a likely possibility for me–I never would have experienced or understood this kind of love in anything other than an abstract way.
But this is the thing about love that I also think about: we don’t get to experience every version of love, or reach every layer of this incredible and complex emotion in our lifetime. Due to the idiosyncrasies of human choice spurred by the unconscious and the people we happen to encounter in life, we only get to experience a piece of love in our lives. A small percentage of it. A slice. If we’re lucky.
Had I not become a father perhaps I would have encountered a different kind of love that I’m not experiencing now. And even though I’m fortunate enough to be able to see and feel the type of love that fatherhood brings, there are innumerable versions of love that I will not experience in this life. I’ll never experience what it’s like to love more than one child at the same time because I will never have more than one. I’ll never know what it’s like to raise two or three kids, support them, love them in different ways, be loved in different ways, or dig deep to find enough time and empathy for all of them at once. From what I’ve seen that’s really hard. In some ways, I’m able to reach a deeper connection with M. because she’s one person, and I’m able to reserve my reservoir of love only for her rather than carving it up at any given moment and sharing it with her siblings. I’ll also never experience what it’s like to be in a decades-long enduring relationship with one person. That ship has sailed.
There are benefits and drawbacks to everything in life. With love, you get what you get and you don’t get upset. There are so many people in this world who don’t get to experience love at all, or at least not enough love when they most need it, as children. I will always believe that this deprivation accounts for 99% of the world’s problems because unloved children typically become unloving adults. If we’re lucky, we will get to experience love in some form in this life, even if it’s not the form we desire in any given moment, or the form that everyone else has that looks so amazing to us from the outside but probably isn’t.
When I think about love, I think about the hope and promise that love can be found at any moment if we are open to it, a sentiment that’s represented in too many love songs to count, including this favorite:
When I think about love, I think about loving someone again and how nice it would be to find someone special and apply every valuable thing I’ve learned to that new relationship.
Then I think of how exhausted I still am from the obligations of an exclusive relationship and turned off by the idea of committing to someone right now. I think of how my last two relationships took a bigger toll on me than I realize. I think of how much I enjoy and value being alone and uncommitted to anyone but myself, how I’ve finally attained (or re-attained) that elusive goal of being perfectly happy alone and not relying on anyone else for happiness or validation of my worth. I think of how much I’m enjoying my freedom and not having to please or answer to anyone else. I think of how I’ve been on dates with 30 different women in the past year and a half (which is insane to even contemplate), and I can count on one hand the number of women I wanted to see more than once.
Then…
Just as I’m thinking all this, just as I’m satisfied with things as they are, just as I’m immersed in the enjoyment of, as Whitney put it, The Greatest Love of All, I meet someone. Someone attractive and intriguing, yet open and in possession of that elusive edge I’ve been chasing for a year and a half. Someone who is as attracted to me as I am to her. Someone both grounded and on fire inside. Someone who is ready for something real and lasting. Someone who checks a lot of my boxes and will have me going on my first fourth date in five years on…. Valentine’s Day.
You’re up, Michael:
For weeks, a voice in my head has been telling me to take things slowly this time and trust the process, and this is what I’ve been doing. Every part of this growing connection has been patient, intentional, and thoughtful, and it has not lessened the experience at all. Quite the opposite. I have therapy to thank for this. I don’t know where it will lead. It’s brand new, and we’re still getting to know each other. It will lead somewhere or nowhere. But everything about it so far has been positive and quite unexpected. This purposeful and exciting unwrapping of a new connection, this slow burn, this focus on the future and possibilities instead of past disappointments feels like waking up. I’m enjoying it very much, with the full understanding that my value and self-worth have nothing to do with how this turns out, or what it may become or not become.
When I think about love, I continue to be amazed by love’s optimistic resilience in the face of so much past pain, sadness, and disappointment. MY resilience. I think that we are hard-wired to seek love and connection. It’s in our DNA. I think we all deserve love, to love and be loved, even the worst of us. I think that many of the worst of us are the worst of us because we were deprived of love when we most needed it and never learned how to accept it into our lives or provide it to another. Our walls and masks became too strong. This is incredibly sad and yet, I see it everywhere.
When I think about love, I think about these lyrics from The Rose, which, after all the breaks, endings, and losses I have experienced in my life thanks to love and its bittersweet lessons, always manage to water my eyes:
When the night has been too lonely
And the road has been too long
And you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snow
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love
In the spring becomes the rose
This is what I think about when I think about love.
Your turn.
