The recent entries about depression have gotten me to thinking about various aspects of my life and how they might be playing a part in this malaise. Normally, this is all very introspective, but I’ve been finding that writing has been very cathartic, so I figured I’d think out loud on paper on the interwebs… as it were. This set of blogs will be me going over parts of my life that have had an impact on the kind of person I am, which might help me to understand why I’ve been in such a funk lately. This particular entry will be about the women who I have fallen in love with over the course of my life, and what I learned from each of them.
I’ve only ever been in love four times in my life. There have been a lot of crushes, a lot of interests, but only four women have been burned into my memory because of my feelings for them. Not all of them loved me back, or even knew how I felt, but they all had a profound effect on the kind of person I’ve become, and there are aspects of my character that can be directly traced back to these women. I don’t know if four is considered a lot or a little, or if that’s about average, but that’s the number that I have, and they all pop into my head from time to time, sometimes fondly, sometimes not. I’m going to keep names out of here because I’d rather not embarrass anybody, but people who know me know who they are.
The first woman I ever fell in love with was my high school biology teacher. Like I said, just because I was in love with them doesn’t mean they ever returned it or knew about it. However, she was the first woman I ever had strong feelings for. Some may call it a schoolboy crush, and that’s fine to have that opinion, but I know how I felt. As silly as it is to say, she was the first woman who ever made me really know that I liked women. Not saying my sexuality was ever in doubt, but I was what some would call a late bloomer, and up until that point, I hadn’t really found any girls really all that attractive. I thought there were some cute ones, and some pretty ones, but I would look at them like I would a pretty piece of art. Nice to look at, but ultimately, just an appreciation of beauty, not something I was attracted to.
With this teacher though, she showed me qualities in a woman that I found myself drawn towards. It helped that I found her excessively attractive, and not only because I was in an all boys school and therefore surrounded by nothing but other guys. However, that wasn’t what drew me too her. She has this boundless energy, and this endless optimism. She always had this smile on her face, which made her just light up, and I never missed an opportunity to see her and hope to catch that smile. The thing that stuck out in my mind about her was that she was the first woman that I ever knew to utter the words, “I love you,” to me, although mind you it wasn’t in a romantic context. Her words exactly were, “I love you, but you are the most pessimistic person I know.” It was a throwaway sort of line, and now that I think back on it, she probably said some variation of that to a lot of other students, but at that moment, it was shocking to hear those words said to me, in any context. It never occurred to me that I could be loved, as strange as that sounds, and it was just really heart warming to hear it.
For some time after that, even after I graduated, I would stop by the school just to say hi and see her. I eventually lost touch when she left the school, and I held her on a pedestal for quite some time afterwards. I’ve learned some things since then that has brought my image of her back down to earth, but I still think of her fondly, and wish her the best. I wish I had been able to keep in contact with her, because she really was one of the few bright spots in my otherwise gloomy high school experience, and I always wanted to thank her for that, but alas, life has deigned to remove her from my life fully. (That was a lot more florid than I wanted to say it, but for some reason it fits… so I’ll leave it.)
Not too long after I graduated from high school, I met the second woman I would ever fall in love with. With her, it was the first time any woman had ever shown any interest in me. I don’t mean to say she was attracted to me, I just mean she actively sought me out to do things with. Oddly, it wasn’t in college that I met her. Instead, I had met her at a restaurant I frequented, and it was pure happenstance that we ever got to know each other. I had spoken to her briefly in previous visits, but there was one time where, for reasons I don’t recall, we decided we would hang out. It was completely random, because up until that point, I don’t think I had spoken more than a handful of words to her, but it just sort of happened, and I went with it.
What struck me the first time I spent time with her was how open and friendly she was. It just seemed like the most natural thing in the world for us to be hanging out, even though I was honestly nervous as all hell that first time. I had never spent any serious alone time with a girl before that, so it was a new experience for me. I felt awkward through much of the night, but as it progressed, I was able to loosen up and just enjoy the night. Another first for me, on the way back to the train station, we held hands. I’m surprised my hands didn’t sweat so much it would’ve grossed her out. Prior to that, the only time I had held a girl’s hand was when I was in grade school, and we needed to hold hands for the buddy system. Like I said, late bloomer.
We would go on to spend a lot more time together after that, when we found that we seemed to get along really well. She had a lot of the same qualities as my bio teacher, in the sense she had a lot of energy and seemed really optimistic. The biggest difference though, since I had the opportunity to get to know her, was how human she was. While I held my teacher up on this pedestal, this person had very real life troubles, and issues that weighed on her. Hanging out with her, I got to learn how people had to cope with things when it seemed like the world was against them. From her, I learned how sheltered my life really was, and due to that, I tried my best to make her happy. I would go out of my way to do things for her to make her smile. She also gave really great hugs, so that was a reward I couldn’t pass up.
After spending all this time with her, I couldn’t help but develop feelings for her. There were moments during the times we spent together where I felt as if maybe more could happen, but I was never able to act on any of them due to fear of rejection. This led to some mixed feelings on my part, because I wasn’t sure if it was just me reading things wrong, or if my lack of action was sending mixed signals. Whatever it may have been, things started to get a little awkward. It didn’t help as I was still very immature when it came to these feelings, and I was unable to deal with them properly, and ended up feeling possessive. Despite having no claim to her, I ended up getting jealous over things that were none of my business or outright ridiculous, and it would end up fracturing our relationship. Initially, she was very understanding, and wanted to remain friends. However, I couldn’t get over myself, and I did one of the few things in my life that I regret. I wish I had handled it better, but I drove a wedge into that friendship that it would never recover from. We remained friends in name only after that, but it always felt awkward whenever I was around her, and the conversation never flowed as freely as it used to. It’s been a long time since all of that happened, and we’ve since buried the hatchet, so to speak, but it will never be what it was in terms of our interactions with each other, and I do miss it. I do hope she ultimately finds happiness, and if she ever needs me, I would love to be there, but it’s not likely to ever happen.
For a while after that, I didn’t really meet any girls that I had any interest in. I began to fall more into the stereotypical role of hardcore geek. I surrounded myself with geek culture; comic books, video games, anime, manga, the internet (which was still the realm of the geek at the time), and I was isolating myself from the world at large. I was nearing the end of my college career when I would get a job with a company based on Wall Street, and there I met this girl who would, in a roundabout way, introduce me to the next girl I would fall in love with.
It was the strangest chance meeting. I became friends with the girl from my job, because we found we had similar interests in random things, and also that we were in the same school. Because of this, she invited me to take a swim class with her, which is not something I would ever have done before, mainly because I can’t swim and am generally terrified of drowning. However, at the time, I was on a self-improvement kick, and my friend kept bugging me, so I decided that getting over that fear would be a good thing, so I agreed to join. I go to the first class, and wouldn’t you know it, the friend I signed up with didn’t show up. In fact, there was only one other person there, and it was this short little girl. Since I had descended so far into my geek habits, I was less than amicable towards her, since I was kind of pissed that I was alone at this thing that I had only signed up for because my friend had coerced me to go. What little conversation with her was curt at best, and I resolved to not come the next time if my friend wasn’t showing up.
So I confirmed with my friend for the following week, and showed up early for the class because I had nothing better to do. As I sat there, this cute girl walks in, and looks at me as if she knew me. I had no idea where I knew her from, until she spoke to me and I realized it was the same girl who was at the swim class the last time. When I had first met her, she had on goggles and a swim cap, and here she was without the goggles, and her hair out, and I had no idea she was as cute as she was. We chatted for a few minutes, and then got going to get changed. After the class was over (and I chastised my friend for not showing up the previous class) I asked the girl from earlier if she wanted to have lunch together. I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but she surprised me by saying yes, and we went to BBQs.
As we sat there chatting, I once again felt that comfortable feeling, as if I had known her for a long time. During that chat, we found the oddest coincidence that we actually lived just four blocks apart from each other, and had been for several years. Mind you, we met at the school’s gym where the pool was, which was on the complete other side of the city, so it was a strange moment to find out we were basically next door neighbors. After this revelation, I suddenly found myself running into her all the time, and we soon became fast friends.
We started spending so much time together, that once again, I began to develop feelings for her. This time, I tried to remain more level-headed, but apparently I was still too immature, and once again, made a fool of myself. This time however, when she said we should remain friends, I was able to back off and just concentrate on the friendship, and we maintained a very solid relationship. She stuck by her word to try to stay friends, and we were as close as two friends could be. We spent nearly every day together, doing everything from biking, watching TV, skiing, rollerblading, going out to dinner, cooking at each other’s places, to just chilling and talking with a beer. Over time though, some things changed, and we became intimate. Despite that, she never acknowledged any feelings for me, and it caused me to be rather confused as to the nature of our relationship. She never acknowledged me as a boyfriend, but I never stopped admitting my feelings for her, so we were at a sort of weird impasse. The reasoning behind her failure to acknowledge any feelings for me were kind of strange, as she would tell me she wasn’t attracted to me, but her actions spoke otherwise. She also tended to knitpick a lot about my personality traits and how I looked and dressed, and would constantly try to make improvements. Me, being the in love fool I was, followed her “advice” and made some pretty drastic changes to myself.
This all finally came to a head after a few years when I finally gathered the courage to tell her that I needed to hear some sort of acknowledgement of our relationship. I straight-forwardly told her that if she didn’t, I couldn’t remain in this type of strange holding pattern, with this unrequited love forever. She told me that she couldn’t force herself to feel that way about me, and I had basically closed the book on that chapter of my life. This coincided with a trip of hers with her family, so I felt the need to tell her these things before she left because it just felt like the right time to get it off my chest.
Wouldn’t you know it, during the time that she was away, my future wife would walk into my life. Well, more like message her way into my life, as we met on Myspace because she sent me a random message. Normally, I would think it was spam, but I decided to look at her profile, and found that it was an actual person, not some weird robo-messager who was attempting to convince me to join a sex website. I was still doubtful at first, because when I saw her profile because, I couldn’t believe how hot she was, but I took a chance, and we began a conversation online, where I made some awful puns, and she actually laughed at them, which told me I was dealing with a very different kind of girl. We decided to meet shortly after those initial messages, and found that we hit it off incredible well, despite spending the first two hours in each other’s presence without speaking so much as 2 sentences to each other (we were at Barnes & Nobles reading manga together).
And thus began the most difficult year of my life. When the other girl came back from her trip, she found out that I had met a new girl, and despite her previous protestations, the green-eyed monster reared its ugly head. Suddenly, all of the feelings that I had expressed to her had become a big lie, and I had been deceiving her all that time when I had been telling her I loved her. Mind you, this was literally 3 days after I had met my future wife, and I hadn’t even gotten to know her all that well and wasn’t even sure if it was going to go anywhere, before the first girl decided to rip my head off.
During the course of the next year or so, I attempted to stay friends with the girl who didn’t love me, because she had stayed true to her word before, when I had made a fool of myself. Needless to say, it was hard on my new relationship, but somehow, she stuck by me. She was so patient as I would engage in these drawn out conversations with my “friend” that lasted until well into the wee hours of the morning. My future wife would literally be waiting in my bed at home while I was down the block, at my friend’s house, arguing with her about all of these things she was accusing me of, primarily some form of betrayal. I would come home, exhausted, weary, sad, and angry, and my future wife was just waiting in bed, welcoming me back with open arms, a warm hug, and a loving kiss. Never in my life had I experienced that, someone who just seemed to care about me so much that they were willing to put up with that much ridiculousness.
Eventually, I broke off all ties with this friend of mine. I look back at that time of my life as a learning period. While she was harsh on me about my appearance and general demeanor, it did force me to make some changes that I was unwilling or hesitant to make, and I did improve a lot because of it. If it had not been for her, I wouldn’t have been ready for the relationship that I was to have with my future wife, because oddly enough, I gained a lot of confidence from dealing with a girl like her. It made me aware that I was able to make someone happy, even if they had a hard time expressing it. It showed me the amount of fortitude I had to deal with a difficult situation. It taught me how to communicate to the best of my abilities, so that I was clear with my feelings. While it didn’t end well, I was able to gain a lot from it, so while I don’t have the best feelings toward her, I am grateful for her influence in my life, if for no other reason than what became of it.
This brings me of course, to the fourth and final love of my life, my wife. As I said before, she showed an amazing amount of patience during that particularly difficult time. She also showed me that someone could love me for who I am, not for who they want me to be. She accepted me as I was, and actually encouraged some of my more geeky behavior. It was a shock to me, to say the least, but here was this incredibly attractive woman who loved me, who wasn’t afraid to say it or show it, and who didn’t want me to be anything or anyone else than what I was. My mind was blown. Obviously, that story is ongoing, and it’s a happy one so far, despite my depression.
From my wife, I learned that I could be who I am, and still find love. I also learned that I was capable of taking care of someone, as she was having a bit of a hard time with her life at the time I met her. She was a bit lost with her direction in life, and I did my best to foster her growth as she was groping around to find who she wanted to be. That search is not done yet, but neither is mine, and we’re working together to find who we ultimately want to be as we get older. We’ve had our trials and tribulations (to use a cliché) but we know that the best way to get past them is to work together, and communicate as much as we can. Now that we have a daughter, we have found that we’re either not bad parents, or have been very lucky with our child. Either way, we have a beautiful, sweet baby girl who brings up joy with her every waking moment.
Maybe it got a little sappy at the end there, but looking back at how my life has been shaped by my relationships, and the difficulties I’ve faced, it’s made me more appreciative of what I have now. I may not be magically cleared of my depression, but having a little bit of perspective on where my life has been and where it is now does make some things easier to bear. Of course, the whole purpose of these entries is to gain some perspective, so I guess we’ll see what kind of progress can be made with the next post.
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