Tra la! It’s May!
The lusty month of May!
That darling month when ev’ryone throws
Self-control away.
It’s time to do
A wretched thing or two,
And try to make each precious day
One you’ll always rue!
-Camelot
Seventeen years ago today, I started dating the woman who would become my second wife. I’d met Sara at a Twelve Step meeting in the summer of 1991. I was a year into my troubled first marriage and, at the time, just over a year clean and sober. Sara and I shared the same sponsor, and we became fast friends.
I fell in love with Sara very quickly. I’d had affairs while engaged to the woman who became my first wife, and that behavior hadn’t stopped after we’d gotten married. (This raises the excellent question of why I wanted to get married in the first place, which is another story). I never attempted anything with Sara, however. Rather, from the summer of 1991 until the summer of 1992, I spent as much time as I could with her and our friends in the program, minimizing my time in what was a very unhappy and frustrating marriage. (For which I take full responsibility. I was a wretched, manipulative, passive-aggressive, dishonest cad. I operated under the noxious principle that my own pain was so great it served to exculpate me from any pain I might cause others.)
Sara and I talked on the phone daily; I became her confidante and best friend. She figured out that I had a crush on her, but made it clear (in subtle and unspoken ways) that she didn’t reciprocate. Eventually, I left my first wife at the urging of the sponsor whom Sara and I shared; my sponsor told me, wisely enough, that I needed to find a way to be faithful in my marriage or I needed to end it. I chose to end the marriage in July 1992.
Sara and I grew closer, but even after I was single, I never attempted to start a relationship with her. I was terrified of losing the friendship, and was certain that her love for me was entirely platonic. So I pursued other romantic adventures, TAed classes, prepared for my doctoral exams, edited UCLA’s Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and lost a lot of weight. I dreamed about Sara at night, fantasized about a life with her, and kept it all to myself. ‘Twas a familiar story of unrequited graduate student longing.
On May 4, 1993, Sara invited me to her apartment in Brentwood, a few miles from campus. We had a weekly Tuesday night dinner arrangement, and these occasions were the highlights of my week. Sara and I would laugh and talk and gossip about the program; we would read poetry together and eat fat-free cookies for dessert. (Remember the “fat-free” craze of the early 1990s, long before the Atkins outbreak of a few years later?) That Tuesday night, Sara took my hand as soon as dinner was finished, and in a gentle, trembling voice told me that she had feelings for me. She explained that she’d always known how much I’d loved her, but while I was married, she’d blocked them completely. As we’d become closer friends in the months since I’d been separated from my wife, Sara explained that she’d begun, slowly, to reciprocate the feelings I had for her. She was in love with me, she told me that night, and wanted to know if we could start seeing each other in a new way.
I made it home to my apartment a little before five the next morning. I wrote in my journal as soon as I got in: “Yesterday was the best day of my life. I have never been happier.” And for the next week or two, I was walking on air. The dream of everyone who has an unrequited crush on a friend is that that friend will suddenly fall in love with them as well. It rarely happens. But it happened to me, and I was over the moon with joy.
The relationship, I’ll note, was an utter disaster. Sara and I had been magically close as friends; we were awful as lovers. It’s not that the sex was bad, but that our capacity to communicate seemed irrevocably compromised by romantic intimacy. What had flourished so easily in our platonic relationship collapsed very quickly under the weight of something very different. But we persevered. We were both — and here is the point of the post — desperate to make things work because to admit failure would have been to lose the friendship that had been the relationship’s genesis. Sara and I both felt we had no choice but to keep trying. And we spiraled downwards fast.
We were engaged before my first divorce was final, and we were married in a lavish Palm Springs wedding in the autumn of 1994. We were separated twenty months later, following my relapse after more than six years of sobriety. I haven’t laid eyes on Sara since she kissed me goodbye in a hospital in June 1996, and she remains the only ex of mine to whom I have been unable to make amends or even attempt closure. I do know that Sara ended up coming out as a lesbian a few years after our divorce. Where she lives now, I have no idea, and in this technology-saturated age, have resisted the temptation to find out.
A few years after we separated, a psychic told me that Sara and I were supposed to be brother and sister in this lifetime. That, the psychic explained, was the source of our intense platonic bond — and the explanation for why our romantic relationship had proved so catastrophic. “Your souls knew you were committing incest”, the psychic said, “even if you weren’t consciously aware of it.” That sounds like a lot of woo, but the point was a fair one. Sara and I had been such dear friends, so devoted to one another, that each of us had developed the fantasy that we could easily transition into an equally devoted and intense love affair. I developed the fantasy early; she developed it late, but we both came to believe in it.
And when we found that the chemistry we’d had as platonic friends turned poisonous in a sexualized context, our disillusionment and bewilderment was profound. I’ve never said such hurtful things to a partner as I said to Sara; nor have I ever been on the receiving end of hateful diatribes like the ones my second wife delivered to me. But our rage, I came to see years later, was rooted in a profound sense of mutual betrayal. Each of us blamed the other for not keeping the initial relationship as it ought to have been. Each of us clung to the illusion that we could make things work. It ended very badly.
One of the many small blessings of that second marriage was that it ended my habit of getting crushes on female friends. It’s a common dynamic: boy meets girl, boy projects a huge fantasy onto girl, girl just wants to be friends, things muddle on in a state of awkwardness. (Lots of boys in these instances have “Nice Guy” syndrome, rooted in a sense of frustrated entitlement.) I had these unreciprocated crushes and obsessions on and off for years, from 16 to 26, on perhaps half-a-dozen close female friends. Finally, with Sara, my most fervent wish came true. And the aftermath was sufficiently ugly that it served to cure me of the habit.
I could have posted about other things today. But for some reason, the date echoed in my head when I woke up this morning. More traditional posting coming soon.
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