Before I left for Mexico, I started to fall in love with someone ... I think. He sent me heart-spilling emails while I was away, saying things like, “My desire is alive and growing for you … ” and “I find myself thinking about you so much, more and more since you’ve been gone,” implying that if he wasn’t already in love with me, he was very close to it. I was feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of our affair, which dramatically expedited the end of a dying relationship that had nearly extinguished my sex drive, and whisked us both into a tumble of passion that poets may exalt in the verse of burning organs and singing hearts.
My heart sang to many other tunes in Mexico, the land of erotic adventure, as immersion in another culture buried the man who was overwhelming me with ambiguous emotion. When I came back to this city of brazen sex columns, I felt disconnected from him and broke it off ... but not before I confronted him about his feelings. “It seems like you’re in love with me,” I said. A pregnant pause gave birth to this response: “I’m not in love with you. I like you a lot, I feel deeply connected to you in a lot of ways, but we have some incompatibilities ... I don't think I could domesticate with you.” Excuse me? Since when did domestication become a criterion for love? People fall in love with domestically incompatible people all the time. Just look at the divorce rate. (Ironically, my man of two weeks ago is in an open albeit sexless marriage).
This experience has pegged a question into my brain: What does it mean to be in love anyway? One person’s idea of love is another person’s joke. Some people fall in love at the drop of a pair of pants, while others take their painstaking time getting to know a lover inside and out before admitting, almost regretfully, that they are in love, my God, in love, as the heavens crush their egos in a tempest of sweet surrender. “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude … love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians, 13) And then Dorothy Parker said, “Love is for unlucky folk, love is but a curse.”
For me, there are varying degrees of being in love. I could be in love in a moment, with a moment, with somebody’s eyes or voice or some idiosyncrasy, as I was in love with the hippie who pressed his smoky body against mine beneath the swaying palms of Isla Mujeres. Or, as I was in love with the woman who offered her body to the probing hands of strangers, including mine, and she let me kiss her, and I felt a stream of sensual energy flow into me from those lips, oh those trusting lips. But let us not confuse these isolated love moments with the type of love Hollywood loves, the kind of love that turns you inside out, a consuming obsessive love that is more an idealization than a true appreciation of the beloved as he or she is ... which is eons away from long-term partner love, that deeply ingrained supportive committed companion love which takes years to develop and may or may not involve sex, because as it happens with so many couples, the fiery passion of the honeymoon phase disperses into tiny rare sparks over time.
And yet through these vagaries exists a thread connecting certain symbols and signs few people can dispute. When you can’t stop thinking about someone, when that person’s being overwhelms you with desire, when his or her smell lingers long after the scent has dissolved into the air, when you feel that timeless soul connection and you feel like you’re on top of the world, you are indubitably, passionately, completely in love. Even science confirms these euphoric patterns—people in love have higher levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, the neurotransmitters linked to pleasure and happiness. I know I’m in love when my lover’s gaze causes me to stumble over my words, lose my train of thought, and feel as giddy as a schoolgirl on pot.
I did not feel this way about the man of domestic incompatibility, although he was often in my thoughts and his smell often lingered. At times he overwhelmed me with desire. I would be lying if I said his soul never touched mine. I was in love in certain moments, with certain aspects of him, with the mystery of aspects that were never discovered. But I was not on top of the world. I was merely on top of him. Now as I reread his emails, I laugh at myself in the shadow of the notion that perhaps I was looking at them through rose-colored glasses. “I tingle all over at the thought of you,” probably had more to do with sexual arousal than the warm fuzzy feeling of love. And as for his alive and growing desire, I’m now inclined to believe he was writing from the bottom of his cock. Here’s to you, my vacant Valentine.
