My heterosexual sister had a girlfriend before I did, not that their entanglement lasted very long. To give you an idea of approximately how humiliating that was, it helps to know that she’s more than a decade my junior. While I had close encounters of the almost-girlfriend kind in my teens and early twenties, I also had an Ella Fitzgerald problem: socially, I couldn’t get started. Perhaps more importantly, when it came to love, I had a Sam Cooke problem. I suspected that when I fell in love, it would be forever — and that my first love would be my last. It was the sort of dangerous self-knowledge that, coupled with my inherently cautious nature, kept me locked within myself, where I was frequently miserable.
When, at long last, I finally fell in love, I did so blindly, both literally and figuratively. It was, I felt, a reckless, irrational way to feel about anyone, particularly someone I only knew then in an epistolary sense. We’d met online, through a limited discussion of trivial things, and our replies to each other were equally inconsequential at first. I had no idea what she looked like, or even what her name was, and I held my breath those first few weeks in case she was actually a gay man or drag queen I’d mistaken for a lesbian. It seemed impossible to me that she would return my feelings, so I kept them to myself and tried to prepare for her to lose interest in our exchanges.
There came a time when I thought that was happening. She had computer problems and said she’d be offline for a few days, during which time I expected to be left in the dust, a familiar place for anyone as single as I still was in my mid-twenties. At some point during her absence, while watching Looking for Mr. Goodbar on a lonely weekend afternoon, I felt the most pervasive sadness constricting my heart and lungs. If we never spoke again, I knew my life would be profoundly emptier, that I would’ve lost something extraordinarily special. In which case, my thoughts were simultaneously “You knew this was coming, you moron” and “Wherever she ends up, I hope she’s happy.” Then she returned right on schedule and said she’d been equally miserable without me.
We were together for five years, living together for most (but not enough) of them. Just as Sam Cooke sang, I gave my heart completely. For a time, I think she did, too. But it wasn’t what she wanted. When things ended, I was both dazed and bereft. It wasn’t just the spectacularly horrible nature of it, or how surprising and punitive it felt, or the incomprehensible ensuing sequence of events that rattled me. It was also that I was fairly physically unwell leading up to it, and emotionally withdrawn as a result, something that haunted me as my health improved and backslid and improved again countless times in the years to come.
I could never shake the feeling that if I hadn’t been so overwhelmed by stupid circumstances at the exact same time she was overwhelmed by stupid circumstances of her own, I could’ve fought harder for us and we could’ve eventually parted ways on better terms. “You got my girl/I still don’t know how” and “For to lose I could accept/But to surrender, I just wept” were my mopey mantras of that era and remain succinct explanations of how I regard those events today.
The few people who know anything about the particulars of that relationship assure me that I’m a knucklehead (or worse) for holding onto any sentimentality about it. They’re probably right. But I know what my life was like before, and after, that transformative experience of falling in love for the first time. And sometimes, when I’m walking around the neighborhood or watering my yard, I listen to a song we both enjoyed from one of the silly, early bands we bonded over and smile to myself — ’cause love is only a feeling, anyway.