Being Whole on One's Own

I was married young to my high school girlfriend.  After 5 years of dating and 5 years of marriage I was informed: “I don’t love you. I don’t think I ever have.”

(There is a scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally where Harry reports to his friend that his wife dismissed him with virtually the exact same language.  The scene is, at some levels, hilarious, as the two men have this discussion while intermittently rising from their seats to do The Wave during a football game.  At the same time, it carries an emotional punch and for me there was a gut-wrenching resonance.  The scene can be viewed here.)

In the months that followed with separation and movement towards divorce, I was devastated and had symptoms of clinical depression. A moment that captured my depression occurred one day while I was lying in bed of an afternoon and the phone rang beside the bed. I looked over at the phone perched on an endtable on the other side of the bed, and thought to myself with total conviction, “It’s too far away to answer.”

This devastation, it seems to me, brought me a gift.  One day I was walking, I can only assume my shoulders were slumped, I walked with a heavy footstep and heavy heart, and I was ruminating on the edge of suicide ideations.  As I walked I thought of the girlfriend and wife of my young life and how painful it was that I felt so strongly that I loved her and yet she did not love me in return. 

And something came to me …  Life has given me no promise that someone I set my sights on to “love” will love me in return. (I put the word love here in air quotes because I now feel that the strong feelings I felt are not best described as love -- a deep solid affection for another -- but rather as a need of mine, a drive inside of me. It was no doubt a strong, primal feeling and I did interpret it then as “love,” but I do not see it that way now.)

It seems to me now that I pressed on in my thoughts. “I will be whole without the love of Any Particular Other Person in this world.”

I think I passed through something inside that day. I felt like a steel of self sent itself down my spine. I know I would not have gotten there, at least not at that time, without the devastation.