Modern Love 50 True And Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, And Devotion

No? No? No? Let Me Read Between the Lines Steve Friedman She dumped me. what's important are not the de-tails but the pronoun placement, she preceding me. But there is no villain here. My therapist suggests I repeat this mantra to myself. So I do. there is no villain here. There is no green-eyed, wasp-waisted, pillow-breasted, sneering-queen-of-the-damned villain who dumped me so swiftly and with such imperious, frigid beauty that I experienced chest pains and shortness of breath, leading to something called a Cardiolyte stress test, which I've just discovered my insurance company may not pay for and which has left me not only miserable and lonely and occasionally sobbing in public bathrooms but also about six thousand dollars in debt. But no one is to blame here. My therapist suggests I repeat this phrase, too. No one is to blame here. Did she have her reasons? Could I have been a better boyfriend? Is it telling that I was forty-eight when we met and never married, that I had spent the better part of three decades shedding wedding-happy sweethearts as a tailback dances away from fiendish linebackers, and that I had recently looked in the mirror and seen, staring back, male-pattern baldness and the egregious folly of my broken-field-running brand of romance? No good can come from dwelling on such questions. So let's assume she had her reasons. What's important is not what she did or why. What's important is how I handled it. Personal setbacks and romantic rejection, according to authorities ranging from the Dalai Lama to the editors of CosmoGirl, offer us all opportunities to behave with grace and courage and self-respect. They also offer the opportunity to do what I did. First, a day after she dumped me, I sent an e-mail message. An affectionate, graceful nondesperate note of about two hundred words that I worked on for three hours. "I remember how wonderful and sweet things felt with you," I wrote. That was good, I thought. Bold yet sensitive. "From laughing and kissing on the tennis court to drifting in the ocean to holding each other and feeling so lucky and grateful. I just wanted to let you know that." Not bad. Heartfelt but not clinging. "And I wanted to own up to the toxic stuff I brought to the relationship. And to tell you how much you meant/mean to me, and to acknowledge the enormous amount of effort and kindness and love you brought to me and to our relationship." I wanted her back so bad it gave me a stomachache. But I remembered with distress the times she had accused me of whining. I struggled over the last line for twenty minutes. I decided on "Write back if you want, but you don't need to feel obliged." She didn't feel obliged. Which made me want to call her. Which made me want to have sex with her. Which made me want to wake up next to her, to grow old with her. Or to see her age and grow fat and ugly very quickly. "She's dead to me," I told my friends. "I was mentally ill to have dated her," I told my friends. "Obviously a borderline personality," I told my friends. "Why did I throw away the best thing I ever had?" I wrote in my journal. "Please, God, bring her back." A week later I received an e-mail message. She thanked me for mine, apologized for not getting back to me sooner, admitted she was sad about how things had ended. Then came the key line: "I just hope we can have some sort of friendship going forward." I decided this was her way of widening the dialogue. I decided this was her way of signaling that she was open to romance. I decided to ignore the advice of every single one of my friends. Not to mention my therapist. I telephoned her and suggested we try again. She laughed. I persisted. She might have used the phrase "just friends," but I have not been ableJones, Daniel is the author of 'Modern Love 50 True And Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, And Devotion', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307351043 and ISBN 0307351041.