To Love. And Be Loved in Return

When I was a little girl, every Sunday morning, my family piled into our mustard coloured Toyota station wagon for the weekly trip to mass. The ten-minute journey took us past the industrial area that dominated my hometown and under a rail bridge over which coal trains trundled. Like passenger trains, these coal carriers adhered to a regular schedule that meant often, on our return trip, a train would be travelling over the bridge as we drove beneath it.

Being a pensive and somewhat romantic child, I was inclined to believe in the suggestion that if you made a wish while passing under a bridge as a train rolled across it, the train would take your wish to that magical place where all wishes were granted.

So for years, on those Sundays when the stars aligned and our car crossed paths with the Wish Express, the one desire I entrusted to it, every single time, was: Let me find someone to love who loves me in equal measure. Admittedly, I may not have been quite so eloquent, but that was the gist of the request – someone to love who loved me back. And, to clarify, by love here I mean romantic love – I was hardly starved of the many other forms of enriching loves: parental, fraternal, platonic etc.

At the time I never really gave much thought to the nature of the wish, to how basic and unencumbered it was by trappings; that is, I didn’t wish for a boyfriend or to have a husband one day, I just asked for love. Only now, decades later, with half my life’s story written, do I contemplate the odd prescience of that wish and the manner in which it was confided to the universe. Did I unwittingly condemn myself by being so vague? Should I have been more specific?

As the years passed and I grew into adulthood, a tiny part of me assumed that, at some point, my wish would be granted. Disappointingly, however, despite the fervour of this, my one and only expressed desire, destiny appeared determined to keep a distance between me and l’amour. 

By the time I’d reached the age of forty, I had only really had two relationships. Well, two and a half, the half being a guy I thought I was dating but who in fact was engaged to someone else the entire time. Silly me. And of the two and a half relationships, only one lasted longer than twelve months – that, too, was a gross error of judgement on my part. None of these relationships were good, and love was not a factor in them, certainly, not the kind of love I’d wished for.

The absence of this kind of connection in my life left me the freedom to pursue other things, which were arguably more enriching, more formative, and without doubt, less burdensome. I learned to live as an autonomous, unconstrained being. It wasn’t always easy; in the past I have had bouts of misery where I yearned for the support and affection one would expect from having a partner (the years between the ages of 32 and 37 were a particularly difficult time). But with sex readily available for anyone willing to treat it in the same manner men do – that is, as a commodity – I navigated my way into my early 40s feeling quite content with my situation.

I’d learned to appreciate the fact that my life belonged wholly and solely to me – that my spaces and free time were mine to do with as I pleased. It’s not that I didn’t want to have someone in my life – but given that I had tried and failed on multiple occasions to force the hand of cupid to point that damn arrow in the right direction – I had finally relented and felt at peace with the idea of not finding the right fit. 

As so often happens, this is precisely the moment that love came looking for me. Unsurprisingly, mine was never going to be a conventional kind of love, but it is – in my opinion – the truest expression of romantic love, free of the shackles of daily life, of the mundane expectations that muddy the waters of love. We will never possess each other, nor presume to have any claims on one another’s lives.

First the first time in my life, I love and am loved in return. It is as I had wished it all those years ago. And, as Nature Boy said, it is the greatest thing I’ve ever learned.