Love sucks most of the time July 3, 1985

  

Dear Mary Kay:

Your letter implied a question that has hovered over us from the day we met.

I do not think you’re feeling nostalgic for the old days at William Paterson, but puzzlement at the dramatic change I went through back in 1980.

I’m really not qualified to write this letter for love as love confuses me.

I’ve watched many friends, both men and women, make fundamental decisions about their lives based on that most unstable emotion.

A close male friend of mine married a woman he had cheated on for nearly two years. He met her on a blind date and eventually decided to settle down, picking her because she had stood by him despite his cheating.

Another friend married a woman he despised. This despite the fact that he had met another woman who he considered brilliant and beautiful. She wanted to marry him. But for some unknown reason, he turned her down and married the first woman instead.

More recently, a very close friend of mine – the subject of the story I sent you, Sailing the River Jordan, had to choose between two men, married one, but still dreams about the other. I think she got herself pregnant to make sure she couldn’t go back.

For many people love is a compromise, not the romantic tale we get overplayed in popular movies. People let go of their dreams for more practical realities. Some get married to cure their loneliness. Others for security. Some for other reasons I can’t fathom, but all give up something important to them in the process.

Love scares the hell out of me. For me, it’s not a bonding, but a promise of a future separation, less a promise for a life time, then one of abandonment and pain.

When I was still an infant, my father left. Back then it was a crime not to have a father. I went to school humiliated by the lack of one. I could no explain why he had gone away. I’m sure it contributed to my mother’s madness. She vanished, too, into a mental institution to which I got dragged every Saturday to see her. I must have been unworthy of love if everybody close to me kept leaving. My grandfather died suddenly. I married poorly, and my wife left, too.

Maybe that’s why I was so cautious in college, but still wound up with a broken heart, first you, then later Suzanne. Michael hated her, calling her an intellectual groupie, but I loved her just the same. Just as I loved and still love you.

I remember the first time we met in that silly speed-reading class in the campus library and the walk back up to your dorm, you reading one of my poems about loneliness. You were the girl from middle class Connecticut, I was the boy from the ghetto streets of Paterson, a union never meant to be. I knew even then I didn’t deserve you. Maybe that’s why I let you slip away. I value our continued connection, our letters, your reading of my newspaper, our sharing of stories.

The man you married had a treasure in you he doesn’t yet fully appreciate, but over time I’m sure he will.

Keep well, and please pass along your new address now that you are moving out to west Jersey.

 

Your friend,

Al Sullivan

 

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