The Great Loves

     So anyway
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     That's probably the best phrase to start with.  Starting strong, you got this.
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     So anyway, I was reading in a book the other day (The Road Less Traveled, by Dr. Peck - It's a book my dad has read like every year and written in, and now he gave it to me to help me with life or understanding him or something)
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     So.  Anyway.  I was reading in a book the other day and came across a statement that the difference between loving someone and being in love with someone is basically sexual (though, not having been Reading, but just paging through, I'm not sure that's what the book was arguing).  I can see where that comes from, I guess.  One falls in love with one's spouse, then has sex with them; one loves one's friends, but one doesn't tend have sex with them.  But then I thought, "No.  People have sex with people they're not in love with all the time.  They might even have sex with a friend, someone they love, but that doesn't mean they're in love with them."  Basically, it doesn't make sense.

     Well, I'm thinking about this now, but that wasn't my first thought.  My first thought was, "But I have been in love with someone in a non-sexual way before."
I have loved many people.  I would count my first boyfriend as someone I loved, though I'm not sure I was in love with him.  Maybe I was.  It was a long time ago and there are bad rows and conflicting feelings and marriages and so forth clouding up that particular memory lane.
     Being in love, however?  Well, there have been two great loves in my life, two people I would say I was (or am) in love with.
     One of them, of course, my fiance.  And, ok, yes, I do want to have sex with him, but that's not the point.  There's a billion and one other, more important, things going on in our relationship.  Really the fact that we're not having sex and I haven't Killed him yet implies there's something else going on here.  I like to say that while it's our similarities that make us good friends, it's our differences that make us good partners.  I am sometimes amazed at what we have, how close we are and how much love there is between us.  I think, "No one else can possibly understand what this is like."  It's hard to imagine anyone else having this kind of special relationship, especially in light of the divorce rate and attitudes I see on tv.  But then I think, "If that's the case, where do all those stories come from?"  If other people have never been in love the way we are, we wouldn't have Westly and Buttercup, or...actually, that's the single best example, I'm stopping there.  Those myths exist because of something real, which is not something I ever believed until it happened to me.  My point is, I'm in love with him.  Yet, I don't know how I would have known that I wanted to marry him, had it not been for the first great love in my life.
     The first great love of my life was my best friend in Middle School and High School.  The relationship we and was another one of those astounding ones, where I thought, "No one else could possibly understand this," until I thought about the myths of friendship that exist in the culture and the literature I was reading at the time.  We were linked in a very special way, to the point where I could wake her up or get her attention from across the room just by looking at her.  We barely needed to talk, we just sort of knew what was going on with the other.  After it ended, I thought for a long time that it was just some fluke of Middle School weirdness.  When she got a boyfriend, we sort of split up.  I guess I was jealous, though I didn't know it.  Paul always called her "the boyfriend I never got over."  I thought that I would never find someone or something like that.  It wasn't until years later, when I looked at my guy and realized that I loved him as much, possibly more than I loved her, that I realized I needed to marry him.
     There was never anything sexual about our relationship.  That's not what our relationship was about.  The relationship was different than the one I have with my fiance, but they are different people.  Yet I would say that I was in love with her, the way I am in love with my guy.
     My big mistakes relationship-wise have happened when I stopped trying to find that kind of love.  I only ended up dating Paul, and thinking I was in love with him, because I forgot what it was like to really be in love.  I wasn't raised to believe in soul-mates (and I don't - not in just one soul-mate, anyway.  I've certainly had two, and I suppose if my guy died, I'd find another).  My mom was always bothered by my tendency to have a "best" friend, rather than just a bunch of good friends.  I'm an introvert, it takes a lot of energy for me to get close to people, I certainly wouldn't want to spread that around.  I had a friend in Elementary School with whom I was very close as well, though that was when I was so young, I guess I don't count it.  My point is, having a best friend of the same gender when I was young, without any weird sexual baggage (sex makes everything more complicated - even if you're not having it!  Stupid hormones), taught me how to be in love.  It taught me what love should feel like, what it should look like.  It was practice, I guess.  I think people discount a lot of what happens in childhood to make you into who you become.  (For example, I recently pieced together a bunch of my ideas for the sort of man I always thought I would marry and realized that I've loved with Henry Higgins since the 1st grade.  I haven't watched My Fair Lady in YEARS.  This does explain why I find tweed so sexy, though.  And older men.  And guys with Asperger's.  Oh, childhood, what have you done to me?)
     One thing I did like about the book's discussion of love is the idea of "the extending of one's ego boundaries to include another."  This is the basic Christian "Love your neighbor as yourself" idea, I guess.  I have often remarked that my relationship with my friend in High School got confusing sometimes, that it was hard to tell where she stopped and I began.  (Another friend once joked that I had an extremely weak AT Field - the part of you that separates "you" from the "other," thought the term usually deals with physical space, rather than mental.)  With this extension of ego boundaries, then, comes the desire to give yourself and the other person what they need to grow.  Love is about truly knowing and understanding your partner, and less about feelings or sex, really.  So it makes sense that one of the great loves of my life would have been someone with whom there was not excess sexual nonsense.
     Being in love, to me, is about transcendence (of the self) and the sublime (all our relationships on earth are mirrors of the divine relationship we will have with God in heaven one day).  Maybe that's wrong.  Maybe being in love is really sexual, and what I'm talking about is some kind of great love, I don't know.  They're just words, they mean what we want them to mean.  I wonder if perhaps I'm not being too limiting, that All love should be like this, and if it's not, then it's not Love at all.  (Then again, who has the energy or the fortitude for more than just a little of that?  I don't mean to sound callus or lazy, but it's intense, and the potential of getting hurt is quite high - almost a certainty.)  Still, I imagine a fair few people would think it odd that the only other person I've loved (almost?) as much as my husband was a female friend, with no sexual baggage attached.  I don't know what that says about me, or about society, but that's my story.  That book was totes wrong, yo.