ON VALENTINE's DAY 1991, WARREN wrote "what I meant to write" earlier: "That my fantasy was for us to chuck all ties and run away together. That I have never loved anyone but you."
The words brought an early spring to Washington. Nothing was tedious or hard for me. My violin playing started to improve. I had infinite patience with difficult patients. I would wake with some sappy old song from the Fifties in my head. I knew my expectations were getting way ahead of me. From my long clinical experience, I knew all too well about the half-life of passion and the unrealistic overvaluation of love objects. But I consciously suspended some reality checks and allowed the neurotransmitters of love to flow as long as they could. After 50, you learn to seize such treasures. I was in sufficient contact with the pains of the world in my everyday life.
#2. There are stages of reunion. Periods of moving very close alternate with periods of needing some emotional distance from an old love. The intense closeness following the "miracle" of finding each other again will normally require breaks during which a move apart must occur. This is a predictable and necessary part of the process. Your old sweetheart may wait longer than you want between communications or might cancel a date because the reconnecting may be too much too soon. Don't personalize the need for periods of separation along the way as being a rejection of you. Let your old love know it doesn't mean you are rejecting him or her either.
What's more, past loss, whatever the cause, is often not worked through emotionally. Unanticipated anger or sadness from the loss of the old romance may suddenly interrupt a pleasurable moment, leading to self-doubt and "Am I crazy?" thoughts. Along with the pleasure of being loved by the former rejecter, reunions activate resentment. The rejecter may become fearful of retaliation for the damage done. It can be a tumultuous time of unexpected swings between joy and anger.
If you need to slow down the reuniting process because of overwhelming feelings that things are moving too rapidly, write letters as a substitute for visits. This is a form of communication that is thoughtful and not impulsive -- a reflective process, and it is positive. If you know yourself to be very impulsive, write your thoughts in your own private diary first and wait for a few days before you communicate.
IN THE OLD DAYS, THERE was a rhythm to our relationship that I believed would save us from boredom and impatience at the inevitable accumulation of small, selfish acts. We were both wholly committed to our work. Warren was going for tenure at MIT. I spent an infinity of hours at the hospital. All the time apart would surely keep us longing for each other indefinitely. Back from our individual adventures we were then eager for marathon conversations. These invariably began with true interest and genuine warmth at his kitchen table. And ended in the bedroom.
Remembering our old pattern of declaring our intimacy a triumph and then immediately pulling away into separate spheres made my frustration between letters that much more tolerable. Besides, I knew what I couldn't accept 30 years ago; you can't force life.
Warren eventually wrote me again, but he was not passionate. He spoke of his need to get reacquainted. "How do I tell you jokes and share the banalities of my existence, the everydayness? Isn't that a big part of intimacy?" He wanted to know who we were now. He wanted to know about the everydayness of my life. If we were going to be passionate about each other again, what about compatibility? Could we actually live together? And what had happened to us in all those years in between?
We wrote long letters recapturing the past and filling in the blanks. But we put off actually meeting. Four months later, one of Warren's frequent speaking engagements brought him to Washington, and we agreed to get together.
There was the merest embrace, followed by talk of things we liked to do. When he murmured something about the hopelessness of a bicoastal relationship, I ran through my repertoire of entertaining observations about life. For a while we sat and stared at each other in silence. When at last we spoke, it was of the bad things that had gone on in our lives since.
He had faced difficult surgery. I had married a brilliant man, deeply intense (as close a clone to Warren as I could get, only much more adventurous and, unfortunately, much more crazy). There followed a long, dark slide into psychosis and death. I talked about the terrible effect it had on me, dwarfing the pain of Warren's rejection. I learned, perhaps, things that I might not have learned otherwise -- how to exist in current time and space, how to recognize, value, and welcome any opportunity for positive experience. To stabilize myself and my children, I had married again, but there was an emotional void.
Warren spoke of his distress at the failure of his two marriages. They had supported his needs and his career. But ultimately they were "strangers," and the relationships were "never enough."
After that, we spoke by phone several times a week, but our conversations were more selfconscious and clumsy than our letters. Knowing that Warren planned to have some routine surgery and that I had an upcoming trip to London, I asked him to call me there. Thousands of miles apart, we grew close; we took chances and spoke more openly of our growing attachment.
Tags:
belief that,
companion,
family relationships,
first love,
fusion,
leadership institute,
long term marriages,
management expert,
marital problems,
men and women,
old love affair,
organizational management,
sweethearts,
universality,
university of southern california,
unresolved conflicts
