Monday 28 September, 2009Thoughts on Love

Two years ago, after signing up at a YMCA in a neighboring town in yet another attempt to gain control over my body, I met the assistant director of fitness; and completely, for the first time in many years since my divorce, fell head-over-heels in like/love. I became, in his presence, a bedazzled, tongue-tied, bumbling idiot-no exaggeration. My embarrassment at my behavior was so intense that I resigned from the Y and never went back. I was 43 at the time.

I have always wanted to write a story about it and send it in to a fitness magazine, wondering if they’d be up to the challenge of printing it. I had even come up with a title for it: The Fat Girl and the Trainer. Can you imagine?  

I could.

I could imagine all sorts of heady stuff with this man. How could I not have when every time I saw him, I had to furiously fight an attraction that was so physical in reaction that I felt it kick me in the stomach?  What was that about, anyway? Come on, now-I was no longer a crazy, love-struck teenager. No, NOW, it seemed, I had developed into a crazy, love-struck plus size woman of ‘maturing’ years.

I can’t tell you how odd it felt to feel so much for someone after such a long dry spell of emotional wasteland. It felt good and terrible at the same time. It was good to see that Love could again permeate my heart and mind and body; and that my ability to love was still intact. But knowing that I couldn’t have it reciprocated was as gut-wrenching as it had been when I was just an innocent; and the emotional and physical pain I suffered in fighting my feelings for him was as deep and as much as it had been so many years before. This, I had not expected.

Do we ever really grow to love differently? I think about how I loved back then and how I love now. Some things/ways are still the same, others have been learned after much experience. Other things/ways have improved, still others have taken a back seat and in my mind, rightly so. So of course growth occurs.

But I had not expected nor ever suspected that once I become a ‘woman’ that Love would still throw me to the tailspin that it still can. After seeing myself two years ago in response to this fitness director, I realized with much dismay that I still can not control who I care about and who I fall for, anymore than I really did back then.

What does this mean, then? Doesn’t Love grow up? (yes and no). Doesn’t Love grow one up? (yes). Was it possible that perhaps I hadn’t grown up emotionally as much as I hoped? (oh god). Did it mean that Love was something that I was still going to be finding out about? (apparently). At my age? (any age). Who knew?