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Gone.

The Awful Truth About Divorce

I never knew what love really was until I saw my wife

for the first time. Of course, it wasn't actually the first time, I'd known her about eight years before we started dating, but that day, in 1987, while I waited in her mom's living room, I remember completely the moment I realized I'd never actually been in love before. She waddled into the room (she had a kind of angelic loll to her walk; I used to say she walked The Walk of The Truly Innocent) and kind of greeted me like I was the paper boy. It wasn't a date, I was just giving her a lift to work. But I was breathless. I was wholly unprepared to meet my future wife but I knew, at that moment, that was, in fact, who she was. And, while there were certainly warning signs of the train wreck, I paid them absolutely no mind.

On our wedding day, I paced nervously about, wishing we could speed things up so she wouldn't have a chance to change her mind. Far from feeling trapped or lost, things couldn't go fast enough for me. This was a person I'm sure I had a crush on since high school, but I'm just as sure that I loved her from the very first night, the very first stolen kiss. We were this cosmopolitan couple. A couple of thinkers. Bourgeois upper-middles who took in the occasional chamber music quintet at Lincoln Center, frequented restaurants with exposed brick walls, hardwood floors and humungous coffee cups. We trolled art galleries in Greenwich Village, seafood dives on South Street Seaport and flew to San Diego for work conventions.

She was absolutely my best friend. The person I trusted most in the world, my relief and shield from a world that never liked me much. And I lived absolutely and completely for her, only for her. For that smile, that sense of humor, that Walk Of The Truly Innocent. When it was working, it worked very well. When it was not working, the aggravation and pain was small ransom indeed for all the joy she brought me. It's difficult to explain the whole You Complete Me business from Jerry Maguire, but that's what I'm talking about. The Real Thing was such a revelation to me that it unnerved me to realize how utterly addicted to this person I'd become, how nervous it made me just to watch her sleep—sleep—and felt there'd somehow been a galactic mix-up at the Karma factory in that I, a guy who had trouble putting his pants on and matching socks—could win the lottery like that. Our love is like a bright and new creation, I wrote in a song we recorded in 1989, that's been unwisely placed into our unclean hands. It blinds us with unearthly luminescence and it feels like forever. The responsibility I had to her, to God, was overwhelming.

Which made the problems in the relationship more difficult to see and, perhaps, more difficult to work on. I mean, I'm sure I heard her, I'm sure she told me when she was unhappy, but we figured we were bullet-proof. Problems were for somebody else, for other people. Divorce wasn't even a conversation; it was never going to happen to us. So, whatever problems there were couldn't be that bad. After all, we were in love.

Hurry Up: Impatiently waiting; praying she wouldn't change her mind.

At The Railroad Crossing

The closest example I've seen of how a relationship like ours could go wrong was a special one-hour episode of the NBC sitcom Mad About You. Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt's TV couple fairly well approximated my own wedded bliss— not without problems, certainly, but nothing earth-shattering, with lots of warmth and humor and odd friends and neighbors salted in for good measure. When the episode aired showing the marriage threatened I wanted to call her, to say, Look— that's it! That's us! The saddest part, for me, was, the TV couple made it. Real life is much tougher.

I'd like to think I've grown and learned a lot about myself, about her, about what went wrong. The truth is, at the end of the day, we are who we are. I am a lot more mature than the man she married, and there are a lot of things I regret, a lot of bad choices I made during that relationship. I have to assume she has grown and is no longer that woman, either. Today, we'd almost be two strangers. Two very different people who, truthfully, might be mature enough to see the train wreck coming and not marry in the first place.

And that is, indeed, the net result of this maturation process: you eventually do learn to see the train wreck coming. You learn to hear the whistle blow and see the massive, blinding headlight as the klaxons on the service gates blare out and blinking red hazard lights flare and the swing arms lower across your path. Things that were always there, but are much harder to see when you are so dizzy from the vertigo falling in love causes you.

When I hear divorced couples talking about how they “used” to be in love, it tells me they probably were never truly in love to begin with. I mean, when I was younger, I fell “in love” every other week. But God had a surprise in store for me when the real thing, when real love, came my way. Real love is the kind of love my Grandmother told me about when she said she re-married after her husband's death, but she told her new husband she could never love him the way she loved her late husband. That that love, that first love, was something so imprinted on her that there really was no thought of trying to duplicate it.

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This must be what the Bible is talking about where it speaks of two people becoming “one flesh.” [Gen 2:24] You are not likely to ever meet a bigger cynic than me, but this sobering realization forced me to grow up and to confront the immense power love— true love— can have on your life. It is a power most if not all men take for granted or never understand as they go through life leaving shipwrecked women, damaged and dysfunctional, in their wake. Like Stephanie Mills, I really have learned to respect the power of love. I don't kid myself and I don't play games with women who have, from my experience, had far too many games played with them already.

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