Love Is Not All

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

 

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

I’m moving. At the end of the month I’m moving. And I am moving in to my own apartment. I realize that all you ‘grown ups’ out there have already done this, probably by the age of 18 or 20. But I have never successfully navigated this particular rite of passage. And it is time.

Among the considerations in choosing to live alone over moving in with a roommate was my desire to make it easier to begin dating again. Aside from the fellationship with the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband at the end of my using, there hasn’t been a man in my life, a man of any consequence, in about ten years. Sure, there have been tricks. I’m not a saint. I don’t know who would want to be a saint, really. If it was a trick I was interested in having I’m sure I could find a way to navigate that, anyway. I want to open the door a bit to the idea that if someone worth sharing time and space with should wander into my field of opportunity, that field is not cluttered with 3rd party agendas. If some Sunday morning desires to be spent with us in bed, drinking French roast and doing the NY Times crossword puzzle, I’d like it to be privately.

Somewhere along the line in this progression from ’stuck’ to ‘recovering’ something has happened that I suppose I could have anticipated but didn’t. The age of the men who capture my attention has changed radically. In my late teens and twenties, all the way up to 40, really, the men who caught my attention were without exception older and richer than me. I had a fierce need for security. One of the 12 & 12 talks about those who place too much dependence on others, describing me perfectly.

I ran away from home when I was 17 and somehow landed in West Hollywood. Young and cute and smart and Mormon and a Boy Scout. I was a commodity, which was a good thing. It helped me survive. It helped that I was intensely attracted to men who could, and who wanted to, take care of me. I certainly couldn’t have done that on my own then. That insane need to be taken care of, the scar on my heart where my father belonged and miscellaneous other quirks landed me solidly in the arms of men over the age of 35 right up till I was 40. Even the IFX, though he was much younger than me, was a father figure of sorts.

In treatment I got a relationship with my father back. I’ve been moving toward ‘growing up’, and this bizarre phenomena has occurred. I am suddenly deeply attracted to men that are approximately the age I was when my addiction kicked into high gear - the men I would have been loving if I hadn’t been an addict. I’m really hoping that by doing the work the 4th step calls for that I’ll find myself accelerating quickly past this quirk. I’d like to get to the point where I’m most attracted to men my own age and am mature enough to relate to them, but that seems pretty far fetched when the object of my affection is another 20 year old straight boy.

At least I haven’t acted on that. At least at the point I figured out that he was straight, something that isn’t readily obvious in this boy, that I backed away and made sure that I hadn’t inadvertently upset him; that we were, indeed, friends.

Perhaps more surprising to me, in light of the off the chart, insane lust I have for, had for this boy, when I discovered he was straight it didn’t make my heart bleed. I was OK. The preoccupation, the intense desire, simply vanished.

I no longer feel, as I once did, that I am dying from a lack of intimate companionship. Though I haven’t been intimate with a man in 15 months I am not too tortured by it. I notice it. I know that I am alone. I am largely accepting of that. But I am still going to get an apartment of my own. I’m still going to create a path for him, whoever he is, should he choose to take it.