Love

A Tale of Two Widowers

October 1, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

This is the sort of post that I struggle to write. I struggle because I have a story to tell and I want to convey the message in a particular way but I am not quite sure how to do it. It is a story of life and death, of the power and pain of love.

It is moments like this where I wish that I could write music because such a tale deserves an appropriate soundtrack. A full orchestra that could impart the highs and lows of this story because I am not quite sure that I can do it justice. Since that is just not possible I am going to do my best to fumble my way through this. All I can do try my best to catch the Silver man, so here we go.

Just a few short hours ago I was at a holiday dinner with my family. The table was covered in with a beautiful linen table cloth and adorned with china and silver. Several assortments of flowers were spread out throughout the table. And of course there were lots of guests surrounding the table.

Now I could tell you about the peals of laughter emanating from children like silver bells or I could share the sounds of my grandparents and relatives discussing the election and the rabbi’s sermon. It wouldn’t be hard because those are probably things that you can relate to.

But then I might miss out on sharing a tale of two widowers. Two men who lost their wives roughly a year ago. Two men who sat at the table and enjoyed the meal, but whose eyes and words revealed the depth of the pain of loss.

It seems unfair that I can’t tell you their individual stories because it is. It is unfair because they lost the light in their candle long before they ever expected to see them go dark. It is unfair because it is unfair. Sometimes evil people live much longer lives than good people. It is unfair because life is unfair.

And it bothers me that I have to teach my children that no matter what we do life will never be fair. It bothers me that I have to teach my children about death and that no matter what they or anyone else does, they will experience death. One day the people they love the most will be gone and all they will have left will be memories.

But I’ll do my best to teach my children to seek the positive side of all this. If the loss doesn’t hurt than there is a problem. I have often thought that to a certain extent you can expect the loss to be as painful as the love was joyful.

I spoke with both of these men at different times this evening and I spoke with both of these men during shiva calls. And part of what struck me is how deeply they loved their wives and how their losses wounded them.

At separate moments they both made a point of telling me to make sure that I truly live my life because the person I love most could unexpectedly be taken from me. It is a theft like no other. I can’t say that I truly understand what they are going through, but I can say that I am convinced that the hardest pain to deal with is mental pain.

You can always find a way to get around the physical pain, but mental pain is a harder nut to crack. How do you turn off your memory. How do you forget and would you really want to.

So I find myself lost in thought about the words that they shared with me and how to apply them to my life. I don’t want to wake up and say that I failed to live my dreams because I failed to try. It is one thing to have tried and failed and another to have never done so.

I can find a way to live with the failure of having tried and been unsuccessful, but I don’t think that I can live with never having tried. Someday is a great way to put off the future, but someday doesn’t always come.

And so I find myself pondering the new year with similar thoughts and questions to those I had last year. If I have any sort of resolution it is to make a greater effort to live my dreams and to do the things that I need to do to have a happier and more meaningful life because you really don’t know when it might all come crashing down upon you.

Crossposted here.

The brain In Love- A Scientific Study

July 25, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

Here is a video that I found interesting. Here is the write-up about it:

Why do we crave love so much, even to the point that we would die for it? To learn more about our very real, very physical need for romantic love, Helen Fisher and her research team took MRIs of people in love — and people who had just been dumped.

100 days of sex

June 11, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

All done in the name of the science:

Denver Post lifestyle reporter Doug Brown and his wife, Annie, were featured on NBC’s “Today Show” this morning discussing a book about their sex lives.

Doug Brown wrote the book after Annie suggested that they have sex every day for 100 days. She said that after 14 years together, their sex life had become stale.

“Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned on their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!),” details the journey.

“Immediately, I had second thoughts,” Annie Brown told interviewer Ann Currie in this morning’s interview.

“When I would tell my girlfriends about it, immediately, their mouths would drop open and they’d ask, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”

“You couldn’t do this for the rest of your life. … It was exhausting,” said Doug Brown.

But he recommends couples push themselves at least once a week, regardless of fatigue.

Annie Brown said there were lasting benefits after the experiment was over.

For the full story please click here.

The Story of Two Souls (Replayed)

May 16, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

I wrote this post quite some time ago. It must have been picked up by someone because all of a sudden the traffic has spiked around it. Anyway, since it seems to be so popular I thought that I’d run it again.

This story has a beginning and a middle but there is yet to be an ending to it and in some ways that is most fitting because it is a story of love and not just any kind of love but one that is all consuming.

The love we speak of is the kind in which you are addicted to the other person, they are your air and your blood. They share your heart and own a piece of your soul. It is the best kind of love and the rarest to find outside of the love of a parent for their child.

Daniel and I had been friends for quite a few years when he first mentioned Anne to me. They were both married to other people and happily so, but somehow they had met online through a bulletin board they both posted upon.

At first it hadn’t been anything more than a minor flirtation that slowly matured and developed into a deep friendship and then into a raging inferno of love and lust. It was not planned and it caught the two of them by surprise as it was clear that the feelings that they had were quite deep and very strong.

In some ways it was a very different and unique kind of love. Daniel and Anne were not strangers to love as they had both had past loves and of course they were both married to people that they thought were besheret. Neither one of them had gone to the chuppah with any thought or sense that one day they would view the work week the way that they had viewed their weekends for it was only at work that they had real freedom to write and speak with each other.

Their love was different because of how they had met. They were an online match, almost a cliche in the information age but it was an accurate description. So it was when they began communicating with each other they were able to avoid the pitfalls and challenges that sexual tension in men and women brings. There was no concern about whether he should try and kiss her or if she should let him. No worries about finding the perfect dress, shirt, jeans, heels, cologne or perfume. It was very freeing.

Anne and Daniel bypassed all that and concentrated on communicating with each other because words were all they had. And something interesting and amazing happened, there was complete honesty. It was the kind of honesty that you sometimes feel when you share your life story with the stranger who sits next to you on a long flight.

I remember well the day that Daniel told me about how happy he was and how scared. Somehow he had stumbled into or onto a relationship that he knew was different. Every time he spoke with Anne his heart sang and he knew that she was someone special.

Anne felt the same way. Daniel said that he felt foolish at how fast she figured it out and how at ease he felt when she told him she loved him. There was no awkward moment and no uncomfortable silence. He smiled and repeated it back to her. He loved her too and he apologized that he had to say it over the phone and that he wasn’t able to show her in person his true feelings.

That moment changed their lives in a dramatic way because it called their current married status into question. It changed their relationship, molded it and forged it into something that had to be characterized as a torrid love affair. It was a burning love based upon friendship, respect, and believe it or not incredible desire.

When Daniel told Anne that he was going to find a way to come and see her he could feel her heart pounding and he knew that when they finally kissed he was going to have to hold her firmly because her knees would buckle. That kiss would be another defining moment.

Shortly thereafter they found a way to meet. It was only for a few hours but when they hugged each other it felt like they had always been together. Lovemaking was something that could not be described as anything but the merging of two souls in common cause and desire. They moved together as one and their goodbye was bittersweet. For though they knew that they would see each other again it felt as if a hole was being ripped out of their being. There was a huge gaping wound that bled and ached.

If there is such a thing as love at first sight they were the couple that would have experienced it. Later that week Anne received a card from Daniel that said:

“One kiss. One touch. One man and one woman and nothing will ever be the same. You know it and I know it and we live it.”

She cried tears of joy. At her desk she looked out of the window and wept because she could imagine losing this man but wasn’t sure how she could manage to get him. She had never wanted to be the other woman. It wasn’t even a passing thought.

Until she met Daniel she had thought of herself as being very happy with her marriage and her first husband. Her first husband, that is how she thought of the man she lived with. He was the father of her children and someone she cared about but not someone she wanted sharing her bed any longer.

She was a good wife and a good mother. She doted on her children and she tried to keep the first husband happy in all ways, but every time she slept with him her heart cried out as if she was being violated.

For his part Daniel was in a similar situation. He felt trapped and experienced bouts of extreme sadness at the time he had lost and would not be able to spend with Anne. She was so good to him and did so much to make him happy but he never could completely forget about his own home life.

It was also good and he was also a good husband and a good father. But Daniel knew that it was only a matter of time before it was obvious to everyone that his heart had a new flame and it made him feel guilty.

He hadn’t gone searching. He hadn’t done anything to short circuit the marriage but somehow he had found someone new and he couldn’t imagine living without her. Sometimes he would try and be practical and think logically about it. He’d think of walking away and telling her that he was sorry, that it was too late.

But every time he thought about it a dull pain in his head appeared and a sharp ache in his side. And he knew that one day they would leave their current spouses and go to each other. One day they would have to face the pain of ending one love affair and beginning a new one and though the thought of it pained him he was more upset by the guilt he felt at the excitement of starting a new life.

So there you have much of the story of of Daniel and Anne. It is tale with a beginning and a middle but the end is not yet written. Some loves can only be delayed but they can never be prevented.

I wrote a second part to this. You can find it here.

The People You Love Most

May 16, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

In the quiet of the night my son asked me to try and explain why boys fall in love with girls. He admitted that there are some girls that he likes playing with, but that is only because they play more like boys do.

I told him that love wasn’t something that you could study or understand. It is not something to be analyzed. It is meant to be felt, to be experienced, to be lived. I wasn’t surprised to see a look of confusion on his face. It is a bit more sophisticated than talking about superheroes.

And then he surprised me by asking if love could die. So I told him that a parent’s love never dies and that he shouldn’t be worried. He told me that wasn’t it, he wanted to know if loved died because Jason’s mom and dad had split up and so had Michael’s.

I asked him what he thought and he said that he thought it could. I told him that I thought that he was right. And then he went back to asking me questions about boys and girls and how you know that you are in love with someone.

We talked about it for a bit and he whispered that love makes you act stupid. I whispered back, “you’re right.” And then we laughed.

I told him that you always need to let the people you love most know that you love them. I told him that when he was older we’d talk more about why boys and girls fall in love. He said ok, and then told me that he didn’t think that girls could understand it because their brains are mushy.

I laughed pretty hard and told him that he’d find out that girls brains operate a little bit differently than ours do. Of course he asked me to give him an example. So I told him that one day a girl would ask him what he meant when he said something. I told him that she would spend time trying to understand the hows and whys of what we do.

He looked at me and said “really?” and I said “yes.” And when he asked me to tell him more I elaborated a bit. I tried to explain to him that sometimes love did make you do silly things. And that sometimes when you really, really, really love someone you get nervous when you don’t talk to them. And that sometimes when you are nervous it makes you angry because you are afraid.

And wouldn’t you know it, that smart boy of mine totally got it. I was pretty impressed.

The conversation meandered a bit and then he told me again that he never wants to get married. I told him not to worry about it and he said ok. Then he told me that he might want to be a father so that I could be a grandpa.

I teased him and said that if he wanted to become a father he might have to kiss a girl. He said yuck and wanted to know if there was a way to just stick the baby stuff inside her without having to talk to her.

Since I heard his mother standing at the door I said that it was always better to do it that way and that talking to girls was a big waste of time. Ok, I almost got through that little speech without laughing, but I couldn’t. He looked up at me and said “I know that you were only teasing.”

There was a short pause and just as I thought he was going to ask another question I realized that he was asleep. Oy, I can only imagine what other conversations we have ahead of ourselves.

Lost Love: Guess Who’s Back?

May 2, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

I stumbled onto an old Psychology Today article that I thought was interesting. It is called Lost Love: Guess Who’s Back?

It is relatively long so I won’t post the whole thing here, but I will provide some excerpts and a link to an Enya video that felt appropriate.

Today, old lovers can type a name into Google. The act seems to be casual, whether it actually is or not. It’s so easy to reconnect that many people look up old flames without appreciating what’s at stake. Most of these romantic reunions, says California State University at Sacramento psychologist Nancy Kalish, are between first or early lovesâ€”those relationships that took place between one’s teens and early 20s.

According to Kalish, the country’s foremost expert in rekindled romance, lost-and-found romances are surprisingly successful, as long as both partners are not otherwise attached at the time they reconnect. In Kalish’s initial sample of 1,000 lost-and-found lovers, ages 18 to 95, nearly three-quarters remained together after a decade of study. When these past lovers married each other, their divorce rate after four years tallied in at no more than 1.5 percent. Usually, second marriages are relatively fragile: In the public at large, nearly one-quarter of all couples who remarry get divorced again within five years.

How to explain the endurance of rekindled first love? “Many of the couples grew up together or shared friends and values,” says Kalish. Whether they were from the same hometown or met in college, “they spent formative years together and became each other’s standard for all romances since.”

Yet for all the power and resilience of rekindled romance, Kalish has discovered a dark side. More of the encounters are now unpremeditated, and many of these people are swept away by feelings they didn’t know they still had, placing marriagesâ€”even good marriagesâ€”at risk. In her latest sample, more than 60 percent of lost-love reunions involve affairs.

The Lost-Love Project

Nancy Kalish was teaching adolescent psychology at the University of California in San Francisco in 1993 when she began wondering about her college boyfriend. She got his phone number by writing to their alumni association, and that first contact reawakened their romance. She took a sabbatical and moved to New York to be with him; they got engaged. Yet problems emerged. Kalish found herself shocked and hurt the day he drove away, never to be heard from again.

At the time, Kalish assumedâ€”mistakenly as it turns outâ€”that most rekindled loves, like her own, were saddled with past problems and doomed to fail. Curious about the phenomenon, she decided to conduct a scholarly post mortem of her own relationship. She designed a questionnaire and began seeking a population to fill in the blanks.

Lost-and-found love affairs were common, she learned, and uncommonly successful. Most of the people Kalish met during her earliest research had been separated by circumstance: long distances and family moves, stints in the military, disapproving parents, the uncertainty of youth. The lost lovers felt their separation had been unjust, and now they finally had the chance to set things right.

“Those forced apart by parents harbored great anger,” she says. “Some had put off marriage and even lost their chance to have children as a result.” The reunions were often supremely vindicating. “He kept kissing my face at the airport, and after 20 years he was saying, ‘You’re beautiful, you look fabulous,’ ” one woman in Kalish’s study recounted.

Such love may sound fantastical, sure to vaporize in the light of day, but Kalish says that nothing could be further from the truth. “These are love relationships that never ended, not fantasies.”

If you read the whole article you’ll see that it covers both the good and the bad of these rekindled romances. Maybe it is because I am a sentimental old sap, but I find it interesting. Not to mention that it really raises a ton of questions.

What do you think?