[Eleanor]: 668.Contest entries.FTLOL.June 2007

He loves me, he loves me not

I was no stranger to love, I had even been engaged once. But all three of my previous relationships, and they had not been flings by any means, lasting on average two years each, had been terminated at my instigation or by a mutual understanding. The first was with a boy I had started seeing when I was all of 14, he 17. I ended up breaking up with him because I realized that two and-a-half years of exclusivity at such an early age was just wrong. He got married a few years later to his next girlfriend. He also got religion, but that’s another story.

My second boyfriend was the one I got engaged to on my 18th birthday. That was a mistake, a big mistake, one that would have ruined my life had we actually carried it through and wed. Luckily, I broke that one off as well.

My third boyfriend and I never really broke up, we just parted ways, hugging and kissing good bye as I climbed into the rental van carrying my possessions away to university. There was no plan to stay together, no talk about the future. One day we were boyfriend and girlfriend, the next we were not. Simple.

It was the fourth boyfriend who broke my heart. I met Scott when I was working at a law firm which took up the 68th and 69th floors of a very tall office building in a very large North American city. He was a law student, I a legal secretary. We became friends (I was still dating boyfriend No. 3 at this time) and were delighted to discover that we were both attending the same university in the fall, he as an M.B.A. student and I in an undergraduate programme. We agreed that we would keep up our friendship in that context.

It did not take long at all before we were dating regularly. For four months I was madly in love with Scott. I often stayed over at his place, I typed his papers and I hung out with him and his friends. I had nothing in common with them, but I loved Scott and would have put up with almost anything to be near him. He was tall, incredibly well built, good looking in a boy-next-door kind of way, and just kissing him would get me going immediately. I was totally smitten.

Sadly for me, he was not. He enjoyed our dallying, but he didn’t love me. Because he realized he wasn’t going to marry me, he decided that there was no point in our continued intimacy and, after bringing me home from a Dan Hill concert at which I had been totally swept away, he informed me that we weren’t going out anymore. 

There were two things wrong with his timing. First, I had been really emotionally affected by Dan Hill’s performance. Second, this was on the Friday night before a final exam in a very difficult course that I had to write on Monday morning. I was so distraught and distracted that I had a hell of a time studying for it. It required that I memorize dates and other non-memorable information, and I simply couldn’t do it. I’m surprised I passed at all.

After Scott dropped me off, I went into my roommate Harry’s room where he was studing for an exam of his own. I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and, after taking one look at me and seeing the stricken expression on my face, he sat down next to me and put his arm around me and tried to comfort me as best he could.

Scott was the first boy who broke my heart, but he wasn’t the last. He just began a trend that ended up lasting for about three years, a trend which happily ended when I learned how to relax and stop trying to make each new boyfriend the one. My motto became: We’re here for a good time, not a long time; and very shortly afterwards met my future husband to whom, 25 years later, I am still married. You see, sometimes there really are happy endings.

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June 2007 For the Love of Love 1st place winner