To err is to love

I have loved a great many men in my time.

If you read my journals in college you would have laughed uproariously for hours.  Every other page my heart fervently poured in amorous declarations, I love him!  I really love him!  And soon a week or month would pass and I had moved on to another.  I remember looking back through one journal, it was the year I'd just turned 21 and I actually devoted an entire PAGE to each of my crushes.  This guy I met in choir.  This one, Pilates.  This guy is an ACTOR and THIS one plays guitar!  Good God in heaven it is a wonder I am ever able to take anything I say or do seriously.  I haven't changed!  It's just as you get older and are no longer in school they're not swimming like eager guppies around you waiting to see if they can score with you.  Well, they are, they just don't have the excuse of extra credit to find a way to approach you.

In Kindergarten I chased them around the classroom.  In fourth grade I passed notes asking boys out.  I like you.  Do you like me or should I start liking someone else?  I had a boyfriend named Adam in third grade and one named Adam in fourth grade. 
(Foreshadowing my propensity for dating the same schmuck repeatedly even at such a young age). 
In junior high I'd get a new boyfriend in homeroom and then be single by fifth period.  In high school I asked them to formal dances.  In college I dated as many guys as I had electives.  And now?  Now I am pining for yet another schmuck who is not the one for me.  And yet every passionate fiber in my being screams,  He loves me! I love him! How then can we not be meant to be?!?

Damn.  For a woman whose been infatuated with love her entire life I sure can't stand it.

How can you be pragmatic when it comes to matters of the heart?

I loved a man once and it felt like a practical sort of love.  I remember admitting to myself it was not the sort of consuming passion I'd felt for lovers before him but I reasoned that age and maturity and faith in God had quieted my passions' flame.  I see now that I was stubbornly refusing to admit my flame was merely a small one.  When it ended and he mournfully declared, I love you but I can't be in love right now the stubborn princess in me resigned to prove him wrong: for no man that in love could ever not be with me!  'Twould be sheer madness!  What kind of love runs and hides?  Psssh!  Impossibility.  Improbability.  Unfathomable stupidity!
And yet that's just what he did.

So ok.  Obviously, when you've a passion for love it is easy to love the wrong candidates.  But here is where I question: is loving ever truly wrong? 

I greatly loved a man once who was a devout Atheist and to my Christianity he was not the right one to love.  But he challenged me and changed me and for much of our time together he cherished me and taught me what it was like to watch a man delight in me, as the woman I actually am.

How then could such a love be classified as wrong?

I think it is not the love itself that errs but the desires that spring from it.
The love I feel now WANTS.  It is dissatisfied and insatiable and stubbornly greedy.  It stirs frustrations within me and whispers lying seeds of doubt to all that was and is and ever will be.  My love poses insecurities and needs I know I'm too much of a woman to believe I truly need.  And while the practical pragmatic reasoning logic tells me Let go! Move on! You can do SO MUCH BETTER HONEY!  My heart....my heart....Oh man, but my heart...it aches for what filled it, for what fit so perfectly.

And I fight my own passion with reason and I remind of the never ending plethora of guppies and I repeat after me, This. Too. Shall. Pass.

But damn if I'm not a mere girl anymore.
Damn if I don't know the partial loves from the great ones.
And damn if the multitudes I've known have felt nothing the way this love has.

Love that changes can't be wrong.
To not love, now that is the greatest crime of all.