How to Stay in Love Forever, Alone

Until Death do I Part

I met my soulmate when I was was 23. It was the night Princess Diana died, just so you can pinpoint the day. My best friend was going to uni with him and she had already decided he was perfect for me. The first time I saw him, it was just a view of his back, clothed in a turtleneck and lovely overcoat, and without seeing his face, I was mesmerized and turned to my friend and said I wanted to marry him. We were playing pool a short while later when he came over and his face just proved my earlier statement to me. Virtually the first thing he ever heard me say was in response to someone saying that Diana had been in an accident, and I groaned and rolled my eyes and said great, now we’re going to hear about Diana’s road to recovery for months. No, the guy said, she’s dead. Oh, was all I could say, while my soulmate is just staring at my callousness.

Anyway, I cleared it up by being horrified by her death, and we chatted and then we fell in love, or at least I did and he showed all the symptoms of it for a couple of years. I like to think he was in love too, he said it plenty of times and showed it during countless moments. We were even sickeningly cute together quite frequently. I’m not saying he was perfect and I certainly wasn’t. He was a Mommy’s boy, with no interest in moving out of home, he was always late for everything; mostly because he spent so much time on his hair and the guy bought me a huge framed picture of Winnie the Pooh for my birthday. I nit-picked, criticized his beloved Mother’s traditional house-wife role, nagged him to grow up and get some independence and the rest of my life was not going smoothly either, so that wasn’t sexy. I was just as immature as him, in different ways, but for me, he was perfect and I knew he was everything I wanted, forever.

Naturally there were signs it wouldn’t work out. Like me face-planting it down some stairs the first time I met his family. To have to stand up, smile and pretend I hadn’t sprained both my ankle and wrist and say hi to his Mother and Grandmother. Then there was the time he said he hoped I wasn’t moving to Sydney just for him, which I was, of course. The most glaringly obvious sign was when we went to his friend’s wedding and on the way home, I asked if he could see that happening for us anytime soon. Without a pause, he said he wouldn’t even think about it for another seven years (until he was thirty). After a couple of years together, you either know that is the person for you, or they aren’t. I should have walked away then, but I was too much in love.

In the end, the breakup was soul-crushing and I never saw him or spoke to him again. I eventually found out that he married the next woman he dated, within three years of our breakup. You would think that would have put an end to that obsession/vain hope, but no, I stayed in love all by myself, for twenty years. I did try to get over him, though admittedly, not that hard. My dreams are the biggest problem, taunting me with memories and reunions, even after all this time. I dream of his life while we’ve been apart, his wedding, or our wedding and our life. One dream even had me throwing myself off a bridge after he had broken up with me for the hundredth time and I woke up sobbing and with a strangely sore back. I frequently wake up believing we’re back together too and that’s way more painful than the bridge dream.

Then there are the reminders. I avoided Kissing Point Road in Sydney for over a decade, because we would always sneak a quick peck there. Cool Water by Davidoff always makes me go weak at the knees, followed by depression. Giraffes make me sad because he loved them and every time I see Amber Ale, it’s a knife to the heart because that was want he wanted to name a daughter. Ridiculous I know, who names their kid after a beer?

It took me a long time to even notice other men. I didn’t even go on a single date for a couple of years and the first kiss that I got, I was repulsed. It was like kissing a slug. That’s very hard to take when you’re used to butterflies. The couple of times I’ve given it a proper try, the relationships were over before they really got started, because I just didn’t care. They weren’t him. There was one guy I dated for a few months, long distance, so I didn’t spend much time with him. It was an embarrassing disaster, with public humiliation. I worked with him, so when he informed me his ex-wife was pregnant, everyone knew. I don’t know if he cheated on me, or if I was unknowingly his mistress. Didn’t matter, I was embarrassed but I was still in love with someone else too, so I sent him back to his wife. He had a horrible skydiving accident a short while later and that poor woman had to nurse him back to health whilst heavily pregnant. Karma got him back a year later when he went home on Christmas Eve to find his wife and child gone. No, I don’t think breaking every bone in his body was the correct karma for cheating - on me and/or his wife, that’s just because he was an idiot who didn’t pack his chute properly.

Anyway, back to me and my shattered, lonely heart. People kept giving me platitudes and cliches - there’s plenty more fish, there’s someone out there for you, he obviously wasn’t the one, you deserve so much better. But I’m a realist, so I know that it is possible to die alone, to never get married, to never get a happily ever after, or to be in love forever, alone and unloved in return. Of course, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy too. I went through the motions of the correct grieving process. That Winnie the Pooh picture came off my wall the moment he drove out of my street but it took me two days to tell anyone. The anger came with being stuck in Sydney without him. Bargaining was tied in with depression and denial. Somehow, I convinced myself that if I worked really hard and tried to fix myself, he’d magically know and come back, so in the next nine months, while doing uni full time, I got two jobs and worked every day, bar one. I’m probably still in the depression stage because I haven’t gotten to acceptance part yet and while he probably did love me, it just wasn’t enough for forever, for him.

I’ve meandered through the last twenty years, had a couple of inappropriate crushes because I needed something unattainable and an excuse to not move on. I have grown as a person, not just from all the comfort eating but I know that if I did have the opportunity to love someone else (or him if he miraculously returned) I wouldn’t make the same mistakes as I did in that relationship. I’m a much better person for all this reflection, but no-one would really choose to be in love alone, as a road to growth. I’d be the first to pass on the same cliches and offer words of wisdom about how to avoid a lonely existence but for me, those haunting dreams sustain me in this state of unrequited love, until death do I part.