The Painful Reality Of Loving Someone You Can Never Be With

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We would never inhabit each otherโ€™s hearts.

The last time I saw John was in a west Michigan town halfway between Chicago and Detroit (well, really closer to Chicago because I always had to meet him more than halfway). We shivered in a booth at the Pizza Hut just off the highway, then bedded down in a cheap motel down a back road, where we talked in the gray-dark about how much we had changed, and how little, in the years since college.

As I offered him my first book of poetry the next morning, my personal goodbye gift, he waved it away with his hands. โ€œI donโ€™t want to see what youโ€™ve written about me,โ€ he said.

โ€œI always told you dating a writer means youโ€™re fair game,โ€ I said.

We hugged awkwardly, then folded into our cars and drove home in opposite directions.

ย 

Although I dated John on and off for more than three years, I only ever got so close. I could never quite get under his skin enough to know he was mine.

It was a lonely kind of love. The first Christmas of our relationship, he invited me home to his parentsโ€™ New Jersey mansion. I bought a Norman Rockwell ornament for his motherโ€™s tree, and she glitter-glued my name across a big felt stocking.

I didnโ€™t know he came from wealth. When he picked me up at Newark airport and drove me down winding country roads in the snow, I wasnโ€™t prepared for the fenced driveway that led to his family home.

โ€œWhy didnโ€™t you tell me you live in such a big estate?โ€ I asked him, but he only shrugged in response.

I could guess he wanted me to like him genuinely for who he was, not what his family offered, but I wouldnโ€™t hear an explanation from him. And such an assumption meant he didnโ€™t really know me, either.

We met in college, when hopes and dreams for Real Life are just that: hopes and dreams. We would journey through junior year and into senior year, through separate lives in New York City (he in Hoboken, working Wall Street in a stiff navy suit; me in Murray Hill, subway-ing to work at a newspaper in my hippy-grunge signature style).

I was intoxicated by our love. By the passion in a thin twin bed of a rented apartment, by the possibility of grown-up lives.

I waited for words. I wanted them desperately. But all I got was the subtle realization that we were so different, planets circling separate Suns, we would never come into each otherโ€™s orbit.

When I moved to Washington, D.C., I promised myself I would finally put John in my past. I was lonelier with him than alone with myself. It wasnโ€™t healthy. We were different religions, held different perspectives on what mattered in life. I couldnโ€™t even buy him clothes. (I remember once wanting to buy him an Eddie Bauer rugby shirt โ€” each sleeve was a different primary color, the front a third color and I thought it was cool and different. His mother, shopping alongside me on a visit to our college town, shook her head. โ€œHeโ€™ll never wear that,โ€ she said.)

I dated other men, made a life in our nationโ€™s capital. Some relationships even lasted for months. Then came the call.

It was a sweaty summer night. His voice was smoky and familiar. Immediately, I wanted to believe he wanted me. I wanted to believe all the despair and hope of the past few years was an evil dream that led to this: happiness, us together without an eventual end.

He even led me to believe that. I think he was drunk in a bar in Colorado, but I didnโ€™t want to see any details other than what he said.

โ€œI miss you. I want you. I love you.โ€

โ€œReally?โ€

โ€œYes. Can I come to you?โ€

He was riding his bike across the country and would finish the nationwide ride in Washington. Heโ€™d stay with me. Iโ€™d drive him and his bike to the train to return to his parentsโ€™ home. Heโ€™d quit Wall Street. He wanted to teach, a career that โ€œmattered.โ€ Were we finally speaking the same language?

ย 

When I saw him on the night he arrived, it was as if no time had passed. John wasnโ€™t tall, maybe five-foot-six, and skinny with thick brown hair. His voice was husky and deep, and tickled my ears when he spoke. His hands were thick-fingered and solid.

The night consumed us with the memory of passion, one field on which we were level. In the morning, I awoke feeling like finally, we have a chance at real love, finally we can be together, finally my life will look like those cliche 80s movies of burnt-out searchers looking for their purpose.

But no. It took only a shadow over breakfast on a brilliantly sunny day to see that nothing had changed. I was no closer than I ever had been.

I dropped John and his bike at the train station and felt that emptiness of being lonely somewhere behind my rib cage. He would always be further than I could reach. We would never inhabit each otherโ€™s hearts.

It was two years later when we met in West Michigan, still holding on to hope, neither of us getting any closer. We hadnโ€™t spoken much, but he never left the corners of my mind.

But that desperate Midwest drive showed me that the door was shutting for a final time. I knew more of who I was, had laid out the groundwork for the life I wanted to build. John was still searching. He worked in a bike shop in Chicago, wondering where he was meant to be. I owned a home in a suburb of Detroit and was inching toward a more religious I life.

We said goodbye and meant it.

Loving someone you can never have is like poisoning yourself. Itโ€™s somewhat suicidal. The only reason I kept hoping for a different outcome was because I didnโ€™t believe I deserved any better.

It took years of soul-searching, therapy and learning from mistakes before I realized who I am, and only then could I find the right person to share my life with.

Shortly after my last meeting with John, I met my first husband. We were better suited than John and I, but obviously not perfectly matched. I was getting closer. It was only when that marriage ended after eight years, and I finally dared to be alone and enjoy my own company, that I became the person who can love fully and completely.

A few weeks after my divorce was final, I spent a week alone in Oregon. It was one of the best weeks of my life.

As I hiked along the rows of a Willamette Valley vineyard, climbed the treacherous switchbacking trails of Dog Mountain, celebrated my 37th birthday over foie gras and red wine at a table for one, I finally realized what it takes to find true love: A love of self and no fear in being alone. A sense of completion before anyone else comes to the table.

And the belief that not just anyone is capable of loving well, fully and forever.

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Written byย Lynne Meredith Golodner
Originally appeared on Yourtango.com

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