Love Story

We’ve been talking about love a lot lately. 

Last week, a friend of mine from college, Amy, came to teach my ESOL class as a guest, one of the requirements of the TESOL certificate she is completing along with her MA in Composition.

The main thrust of her lesson was having our group read a short story together.  She eased us into the story with a series of statements about love that we could agree or disagree with and give explanations for our responses.

“Every person has a pre-selected soul mate,” read one. “Love is enough to make a relationship work,” was another. “It is important for people in a romantic relationship to share the same cultural history,” generated the most conversation.

We all pretty much agreed on our answers to the first two statements. Yuwei spoke about his own relationship with his wife, Ying, to explain his opinion.

“We were attracted to each other at first, yes,” he began, “but over time, we built trust and respect. The relationship becomes deeper and more meaningful over time. That’s love.”

I was impressed by the maturity of his response, given that he and Ying are only in their late 20s or early 30s.

Luz Alba had some experience to share in regard to the third statement.

“I have had relationships, both here and in Columbia,” she said. “And it is always difficult, from the same culture or not. That can help, but it is no guarantee.”

As we all nodded in agreement, it was clear to me that none of us has many illusions about love.

Even Van, who is in her early thirties but has not had much experience dating, had wise things to say.

“I don’t agree with the term ‘pre-selected,’” she said. “Because maybe you love one person and it not work out or maybe the person die. You can still find love with someone else. I’m sure it happen all the time.”

The most eloquent comment came from Yuwei, in response to this statement: “Teenagers are not capable of experiencing true love.”

“Teenagers understand love,” he said, “but they do not understand life.”

That one hit home. Remember that boiling, urgent feeling of love as a teenager? That total certainty that if one particular person didn’t return your feelings, the world would absolutely cease to exist and everything you knew would simply crumble into dust? Or the absolute certitude that no one in the world, ever, anywhere, has ever felt the kind of all-consuming passion you were feeling just then?

Yeah. Me, too.

But those feelings subsided, the world didn’t end, and we all went on to have other relationships and live long, productive lives.

I clearly understood a certain kind of love in my teenage years, but I knew nothing of the reality of life.

I gave my students a homework assignment at the end of Amy’s lesson: write me a love story. It could be about romantic love, filial love, fraternal, parental, material. Just a love story.

Only Van and Santos came to this week’s class. And only Van wrote a story for me. In fact, she wrote two. And they were good.

The first was called “Good-byes.”

“It was love at first sight,” she began. “When Andy looked into her puppy eyes, he knew it....He wanted to rub his face in her soft, brown hair, and, indeed, he did!”

I was a little confused by this until we came to the end of the story.

“Twelve years later, in an unknown office, she lay her head in Andy’s lap...She licked his face as he cried, as if to say it would all be okay. As if to say she would see him again someday, on the other side. Then they said their final good-byes.”

Clearly the story was about a young man and his dog, but Santos had a very hard time getting it. Van and I had to do a lot of verbal gymnastics to get him to understand. He just kept getting stuck on the pronoun ‘she,’ which he was convinced could only be used for human females, not animals. 

Van’s second story was even more oblique, with a dying tree speaking as the narrator. It was quite beautiful, almost allegorical.

“That would make an excellent children’s book about the environment,” I told her. Van’s response was to blush deeply and giggle nervously.

I didn’t write a love story for my class, but I’ve been living a great one for more than twenty years. And this week, my love was tested by one of those awful, very adult rites of passage. A cold, sterile medical test that involved fasting and embarrassing conversations.

Everything is fine, of course, but when the term “pre-cancerous” is mentioned, thoughts of mortality always follow. 

We are in mid-life now, that age when we look in the mirror or at each other and wonder how we got so old, where the time has gone, how much time do we have left. Inside, I still feel like an eighteen-year-old, full of doubt and awkwardness and aspirations for how my life should be. My body doesn't always agree, however, slowing me down with aching knees or extra belly fat or an inability to stay awake past eleven pm. And those aspirations are now tempered by responsibilities and realities, though a few dreams persist.

This is the dividing line between youth and old age, the crest of life where I can see both the long slow ascent behind us and the frighteningly fast descent that awaits us. Now is the time to savor and appreciate the moment, for the moments are slipping by so much faster than they ever did, and I want them to slow down. 

That acceleration of time I knew was coming has bowled me over with its velocity. I feel like a bug who was blithely floating in the breeze above the expressway, happily admiring the traffic below, until the wind-sheild of a tractor-trailer came zooming up behind me. What used to be a welcome thawing of frozen time in spring has become a juggernaut.

I’ve been extremely lucky in my life. I had a couple of brushes with death in my misspent youth, but mostly my life has been comfortable and filled with love, My parents and siblings, my friends, several deeply passionate lovers: love has filled my life in many ways.

But nothing can compare to my relationship with my husband. We celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary this year, and sometimes I cannot believe that much time has gone by since we said our vows in our back yard and jetted off to a whirlwind honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest. Sure, we argue and disagree like any married couple, but there is at our core a deep respect, understanding and acceptance that I never could have imagined as a teenager. I would not trade one second of our solid, dependable, surprising, ever-evolving marriage for a hundred years of the palpitating urgency that was teenaged love.

Both my grandmother and my mother spent many years as widows. The men in my family have a habit of dying too young. But Dave's family is different: his grandfathers lived into their nineties, and his dad is already eighty. There's an average in there somewhere that I'm hoping will find us, a mean of longevity that could even out with the help of some of our healthier lifestyle choices.

I am no longer a teenager, and I understand love and life much better now. So I'll do my best to keep up with this ever-quickening pace of middle-aged life and make the most of what time we have. You never know when your time is up until it's up. "Pre-" anything isn't really anything, be it a preselected soul mate or a pre-cancerous mass. I know I can't count on much in this life, but I’m still counting on twenty more years of life and love with Dave.