How Do You Apologize For Loving Someone More Than You Should?

The above artwork is by Ray Edgar.

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© All rights reserved by Ray Edgar.

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I received the following insightful, intuitive, and intelligent comment today in response to my post:

Loss, Wholeness, and Sexuality

The comment said:  “been tuning in lately, great stuff, thanks for your contributions, i’ll be a frequent visitor.  but i have one question.  why do you call your former lover “my first love” while you call your significant other’s former lover her “ex”?  Like, why isn’t your first love your ex, or why isn’t your lover’s ex her “former love” or what have you?  just curious.”

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OneMoreOption:  Thank you for the kind feedback.

The questions you are asking are great questions.  And I don’t know if I’m self-aware enough to answer them fully.  There’s probably a lot of therapy I could go through to find better answers to those questions.

Responding to your first question of – “why do you call your former lover “my first love” while you call your significant other’s former lover her “ex”?:

“My first love” was not the first person I dated, nor the first person I had a crush on, nor the first person I dated repeatedly.  So, “first love” may not even be technically correct – depending on your definition.  .

But she is “my first love”, because she’s the first person whose love redirected the rest of my life.  I would not be me without her initial and ongoing influences on me. 

I do not call my “first love” my “ex” for many reasons, but there is no hard science behind these labels.  I don’t call her “my ex” because we were never “an adult couple”, we never shared a residence, we never shared childcare duties, and we did not have many of the prior associations people commonly associate with the term “ex”.  We were just two teenagers in a “first relationship.”

But yes, you are correct that “my first love” is an “ex” girlfriend of mine.  But in my cognitive structures, she is better described as “my first love”.  She chose to remove me from her life many years ago.  And my job, every day, is to respect that choice.  As you might expect, she has other people in her life that more deserve her focus and have exponentially better standing than me . . . I’m a person from her distant past.  I am someone she affirmatively chose to exclude a long time ago.

I write this blog for many, many reasons.  One of the reasons is to give a voice to people who have been left behind . . . for poor or good reasons.

I want others to know they are not alone in continuing to deal with being left behind.  I want them to know there are other reasonably good people who never stop struggling with these related and core issues.

I am the child of a beautiful person who was left behind.  I grew up seeing the inequities and difficulties of living with a parent who was left behind.

Life sometimes gives us cruel lessons.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who live the majority of their adult lives, decades, still in love with someone from their past.  And for whatever makes-no-reasonable-sense reasons, we cannot get a particular person out of our thought processes.

And the cruelty of life is sometimes this:  The other person, who we care deeply about, cares little or thinks little of us.  There is sometimes an absurd reality when you “imprint” on another person, and the other person does not “imprint” on you in any similar proportion – or they have such a level of disinterest that you rarely come to mind or matter.

Have we all heard of stories where one person gets in touch with an “old love” only to find out the “old love” hardly remembers the person?  I am very sympathetic to people who have been “put out of mind.”  I don’t understand why life deals some people such cruel cards.  But who of us has not deeply loved and admired someone who unfortunately cared little for us?  It’s a fairly universal condition.

But I am not suggesting the above reasons are “my first love’s” reasons for leaving me behind.  I do not pretend to know all the many layered, rationale, and wise reasons she excludes me from her world.  But it is reasonable to infer she has enough reasons to exclude me for this reason alone:  I love her too much, and she took on commitments long ago that would not allow me (or others) to care for her as much as I do.  And she has stood by the social commitments she made. 

Further, it should be emphasized I had broken off her relationship with me at least twice before she finally figuratively said, “Hey, thanks, but I don’t need to go through your abandonment again.”

It’s synchronistic that you asked this question in your comment today, because driving home from exercising today, this question queued up in my brain, and I thought I might make a post out of it:

How do you apologize for loving someone more than you should?

I don’t know the answer to that question.  But I’m a problem because I love someone from my past “more than I should.”  And this will unfortunately probably be a problem for me, and many other people like me, for the rest of our lives.  A humane question is:  How do you live with that reality?

My father left my mother over 35 years ago.  But the last time I asked my mom, maybe 20 years ago, she said my father still queued up in her sleeping dreams.  And while she has politely and courteously stopped talking about him or revealing anything that would suggest he is still a “love of her life”, I’d wager that inside of her, he is still a “love of her life” – a person she wanted to make things work with – and a person with whom she could never make things work.  This is informed speculation on my part.  And if you asked my mother, she would probably honestly say these issues are not very bothersome to her anymore.

But watching my mother as I grew up, I decided I did not wish to respond to being left behind the same way she chose to respond.  I decided I would not live a lie.  I decided I would not close doors to the people I had been close to in my past.  I would not pretend I had stopped loving anyone – if I had not stopped loving them.  That would be my life’s example.  That would be one of my life’s protests.  I would not lie about:  Who I loved, how much they meant to me, or how much I loved them.

If you have read this far in this post, I’m going to guess you have a few relationship issues in your closet as well (who else would read this much about this kind of stuff?).  I hope you find better ways to make your relationships more inclusive and fun than I have.

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It’s probably better to have an existence filled with temptations than an existence with few temptations.  When our lives are without temptations, it can lead to a more disabling and potentialy dangerous condition:  depression.

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Here are words someone else once wrote that speak to many of the issues discussed above:

Please remember me happily by the rosebush laughin’ with bruises on my chin – the time when we counted every black car passing your house beneath the hill and up until someone caught us in the kitchen with maps - a mountain range – a piggy bank – a vision too removed to mention.

And please remember me fondly.  I heard from someone you’re still pretty, and then they went on to say that the Pearly Gates have such eloquent graffiti like “We’ll meet again,” and “Fuck the man!”

And tell my mother not to worry. 

And angels with their gray handshakes, but always done in such a hurry.

And please remember me at Halloween making fools of all the neighbors, our faces painted white by midnight we’d forgotten one another.  And when the morning came, I was ashamed. 

Only now it seems so silly that season left the world and then returned.  And now you’re lit up by the city.

And please remember me mistakenly in the window of the tallest tower, calling passers-by, but much too high to see the empty road at Happy Hour gleam and resonate just like The Gates around the Holy Kingdom with words like, “Lost and found,” and “Don’t look down.”

Someone save temptation!

And please remember me as in the dream we had as rug burn babies among the fallen trees, but fast asleep beside the lions and the ladies that call you what you like and even might give a gift for your behavior.

A fleeting chance to see a trapeze swinger high as any Savior.

And please remember me, my misery and how it lost me all I wanted.  Those dogs that loved the rain and chasing trains.  The colored birds above their running.  And circles round the well to where it smells on the wall behind St. Peter’s so bright on cinder gray and spray paint.

Who the hell can see forever?

And please remember me seldomly in the car behind the carnival, my hands between your knees, you turn from me and said, “The trapeze act was wonderful, but never meant to last, the clowns had passed.”  

Saw me just come up with anger.  When it fills with circus dogs, the parking lot had an element of danger.

And please remember me finally in all my uphill glow.

And my dear, if I make the Pearly Gates, I’ll do my best to make a drawin’ of God and Lucifer, a boy and girl, an angel kissin’ on a sinner, a monkey and a man, a marching band – all around a frightened trapeze swinger.

The above words are the lyrics to the song “The Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine – one more song my first love gave me.

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