CHAPTER ONE
Dear Philomena,
I’ve been in love with a man for two years. He’s a complete basket case, with nothing practical to offer me. Oliver is still (technically) married. He has two repulsive daughters, three cats, a miniature schnauzer, and a minivan on its last legs. His wife got tired of his habitual unemployment and moved in with the rich man next door. I don’t know why I fell in love with him and have no sensible excuse to offer for continuing to love him. He doesn’t even know how I feel or at least he refuses to believe it. It would be way too inconvenient for him. No, all Oliver wants is a passionate affair. Short, sweet. No commitment. No future.
I’m 28, Philomena. I want to be married. I want children. Did I mention his vasectomy? I want love. I want stability. I want a normal relationship. Did I mention his bipolar disorder? I don’t want passion. I don’t want an emotional joy ride that ends in a muddy ditch upside down instead of in a honeymoon suite. Guess what the “good” Lord gave me?
Lovelorn in Little Hell
Dear Lovelorn,
My advice? Enjoy the joy ride. I think passion is underrated. We humans assume passion is something distinct from love. One has a “passionate affair,” not a “passionate marriage.” Passion is tolerated in the first few weeks of a relationship, but not in the marriage itself. Passion is for nightfall, for dreams, for evaporating sighs. It’s not real. It has nothing to do with love.
I stand (I do not beg) to differ. Passion can only come from love. There is love and there is lust, but passion, true passion, is only realized, embedded, in love.
Let me tell you a story.
Three years ago, on a rainy night in the middle of December, I met a man…let’s call him Jack. I felt immediately, irredeemably, passionate about him, despite all my friends’ fervent warnings. They called him a salesman, a politician, a glad-hander. Cynical, superficial, shallow, and cold. And they were right. He was the kind of man who would sidle up to the desk clerk and talk to her in an intimate whisper as though they’d been friends for ages. You’d usually find him in a crowd of acquaintances, usually at a bar, calling the bartender by name. Or handing out cigars at some candidate’s rally. Or gazing soulfully into his latest victim’s eyes.
The victim, of course, being a woman.
Women were always taken in because Jack listened. Even on the first date, his prey would find herself telling him all sorts of secrets. He’d look deeply, with remarkably authentic sympathy, into her eyes, and before she knew it, she’d be feeding him tidbits from her plate. With any luck, she’d recognize him for the hollow creature he was before it went too far. Jack wasn’t even an empty suit—he was more like an empty polo shirt that he’d picked up as a freebie at a celebrity golf tournament.
I left Jack before he could finish eating my soul. I pretended to believe his self-serving observation that I didn’t love him, that I couldn’t possibly love him. I thought it would make it easier to forget him.
I was wrong. He was wrong. The passion came from love. Dear Lovelorn, know this, that passion is the beginning of true love and the physical manifestation of a profound and unique yearning for another. You cannot feel passion for someone you don’t love. You can love someone without passion. But you cannot be passionate without love.
So, my dear Lovelorn, do not condemn passion, and do not attempt to hold it in check. It is the essential conductor that brings two people together forever. Even more, it prods society to progress. Love and comfort keep the world humming, but our great lurches forward in human development came only in the grip of passion. Passion goosed Galileo, pinched Henry Ford, and gave me the courage to write this.
Your friend, Philomena
The telephone rang. Since no one but solicitors used the land line, Dagne took her time answering. On the fourth ring she picked up. “Hello?”
“Dagne? It’s me.”
“Oh.” Her heart lurched. She wished she could swill down some wine to give her strength. Telephones always made her nervous, and Jack at the other end of the line made her doubly so. “Yes?”
“Great, glad I caught you. Marian told me you were leaving town soon. Listen, you remember that purple sweatshirt of mine? The one with the picture of Maxie on it barking ‘Dad’s Little Princess’?”
Maxie, his Chihuahua, the only perpetually precious thing in his life. “What about it?”
“Well, Samantha wants me to wear it to the doggy play group. Can I come by and get it?”
“Sure.” It’ll be in a plastic bag so you won’t realize it’s covered in dog shit until you’re already in the car. “I’ll leave it on the front porch.”
“Great. Oh, and would you mind throwing in those black boxers with the red letters that flash ‘Yes, Yes, Yes?’ I’m pretty sure I left them there.”
“Not a problem.” For me anyway. Wait’ll Samantha smells them.
Dagne resisted the urge to throw the phone across the room, poured a glass of water, and sat down on the kitchen chair to torture herself once again. Jack. Talk about a catch. Not. When she met him, he had no job, no money, no goals, not even a car. He’d depended all his life on “the kindness of strangers”—strangers, as she’d explained to poor Lovelorn, meaning women. Oh, Jack had a way with him. In the early months of their relationship they made love like rabbits, each coupling holding fresh delights. Dagne had never before felt so alive, so much a woman, as she did with him. She took to buying sexy lingerie for the first time in her life, just to please him, even though he insisted she bought them for herself. He believed it, too. She only understood afterward that he couldn’t conceive of a person doing something solely for the sake of another.
She loved him. She still loved him. But as crisis followed crisis, as need appeared, he didn’t. Oh yes, he wrote sympathetic emails galore, vomiting advice in a self-satisfied way. Then, regrets, he had a standing happy hour he must attend.
Prick.
Her mind went back even earlier, to the time after her divorce became final. She remembered it as such a joyous period—only thirty-one, free as a bird, plenty of money, ready to fly. She talked her friend Polly into offering her a gig with the Alexandria Observer for an advice column. “Dear Philomena” proved to be a winner for the paper, not to mention for her bank account. She had her mother to thank for that. The little angel—Dagne used that term advisedly—had straightened to her full five feet, slapped her tiny beringed hands together in a typically Gallic gesture, and nagged, “I’m tired of you moping around, ma petite. Get off your bum and do something useful. Something salutaire for mankind—and more profitable than those trashy novels of yours.”
One day her neighbor, Marian, asked her to come along to a bar and meet her gang. “Now, Dagne,” she explained before they entered, “these kids are all singles and all wanting to be. No one’s allowed to bring a date. You know, leave the main squeeze at home so we can be ourselves and relax.”
It struck Dagne as a trifle adolescent, but after all, she told herself, “I’m single, too, aren’t I? And loving it too, right?” So she walked into the Pines of Tyrol that evening prepared for a good time. This guy Jack swiveled on his barstool to check her out and was all over her before she even had a chance to sit down. The lines poured out of him as thick and fast as buckshot from a blunderbuss. She stifled the urge to roll her eyes and instead batted her lashes at him. Go ahead, mate. Drool over me.
At first, it didn’t matter what kind of man she’d taken up with, since it wasn’t actually Jack who obsessed her, but the idea of escape, of finding—by some miracle—a lover who would take her under his wing and free her from all her old phobias. She clung to Jack to avoid the abyss of terror she scrabbled frantically to keep from tipping into—the one she opened up when she walked out of her marriage. She took one look at the sudden emptiness of her life and flung herself at him like a whore in a Fifth Avenue boutique with a rich man’s wallet. She pretended to her friends and relatives, and especially to herself, that she loved him.
“You insisted you loved him,” her mother accused. “You expected me to believe you. Ha. I knew better — you figured you’d found a ledge to land on, didn’t you? But you know and I know — not to mention two thousand other women, that Jack’s a—”
“Mother! Okay, okay. Yes, that was true at first. Trouble is, my plan didn’t work, did it?”
Unfortunately for Dagne, Jack fell into the class of Lothario whose unwavering pursuit lasts right up to the minute he reels the fish in. And he sure reeled you in, didn’t he, Dagne my girl? Tossed her, the hook, the line, and the sinker into his creel and promptly lost interest. She didn’t, though. Not a minute went by since then when she didn’t think of him.
“Yes,” her mother would remark in an offhand little murmur that always grated on Dagne, “but with pain, always with pain.”
Which was why, three years and six months later, Dagne still found herself conjuring up whimsical visions of nuptial bliss while meticulously pouring Tabasco sauce on Jack’s underwear, which she would then swish around with his sweatshirt for Samantha’s benefit.
I’ve been in love with a man for two years. He’s a complete basket case, with nothing practical to offer me. Oliver is still (technically) married. He has two repulsive daughters, three cats, a miniature schnauzer, and a minivan on its last legs. His wife got tired of his habitual unemployment and moved in with the rich man next door. I don’t know why I fell in love with him and have no sensible excuse to offer for continuing to love him. He doesn’t even know how I feel or at least he refuses to believe it. It would be way too inconvenient for him. No, all Oliver wants is a passionate affair. Short, sweet. No commitment. No future.
I’m 28, Philomena. I want to be married. I want children. Did I mention his vasectomy? I want love. I want stability. I want a normal relationship. Did I mention his bipolar disorder? I don’t want passion. I don’t want an emotional joy ride that ends in a muddy ditch upside down instead of in a honeymoon suite. Guess what the “good” Lord gave me?
Lovelorn in Little Hell
Dear Lovelorn,
My advice? Enjoy the joy ride. I think passion is underrated. We humans assume passion is something distinct from love. One has a “passionate affair,” not a “passionate marriage.” Passion is tolerated in the first few weeks of a relationship, but not in the marriage itself. Passion is for nightfall, for dreams, for evaporating sighs. It’s not real. It has nothing to do with love.
I stand (I do not beg) to differ. Passion can only come from love. There is love and there is lust, but passion, true passion, is only realized, embedded, in love.
Let me tell you a story.
Three years ago, on a rainy night in the middle of December, I met a man…let’s call him Jack. I felt immediately, irredeemably, passionate about him, despite all my friends’ fervent warnings. They called him a salesman, a politician, a glad-hander. Cynical, superficial, shallow, and cold. And they were right. He was the kind of man who would sidle up to the desk clerk and talk to her in an intimate whisper as though they’d been friends for ages. You’d usually find him in a crowd of acquaintances, usually at a bar, calling the bartender by name. Or handing out cigars at some candidate’s rally. Or gazing soulfully into his latest victim’s eyes.
The victim, of course, being a woman.
Women were always taken in because Jack listened. Even on the first date, his prey would find herself telling him all sorts of secrets. He’d look deeply, with remarkably authentic sympathy, into her eyes, and before she knew it, she’d be feeding him tidbits from her plate. With any luck, she’d recognize him for the hollow creature he was before it went too far. Jack wasn’t even an empty suit—he was more like an empty polo shirt that he’d picked up as a freebie at a celebrity golf tournament.
I left Jack before he could finish eating my soul. I pretended to believe his self-serving observation that I didn’t love him, that I couldn’t possibly love him. I thought it would make it easier to forget him.
I was wrong. He was wrong. The passion came from love. Dear Lovelorn, know this, that passion is the beginning of true love and the physical manifestation of a profound and unique yearning for another. You cannot feel passion for someone you don’t love. You can love someone without passion. But you cannot be passionate without love.
So, my dear Lovelorn, do not condemn passion, and do not attempt to hold it in check. It is the essential conductor that brings two people together forever. Even more, it prods society to progress. Love and comfort keep the world humming, but our great lurches forward in human development came only in the grip of passion. Passion goosed Galileo, pinched Henry Ford, and gave me the courage to write this.
Your friend, Philomena
The telephone rang. Since no one but solicitors used the land line, Dagne took her time answering. On the fourth ring she picked up. “Hello?”
“Dagne? It’s me.”
“Oh.” Her heart lurched. She wished she could swill down some wine to give her strength. Telephones always made her nervous, and Jack at the other end of the line made her doubly so. “Yes?”
“Great, glad I caught you. Marian told me you were leaving town soon. Listen, you remember that purple sweatshirt of mine? The one with the picture of Maxie on it barking ‘Dad’s Little Princess’?”
Maxie, his Chihuahua, the only perpetually precious thing in his life. “What about it?”
“Well, Samantha wants me to wear it to the doggy play group. Can I come by and get it?”
“Sure.” It’ll be in a plastic bag so you won’t realize it’s covered in dog shit until you’re already in the car. “I’ll leave it on the front porch.”
“Great. Oh, and would you mind throwing in those black boxers with the red letters that flash ‘Yes, Yes, Yes?’ I’m pretty sure I left them there.”
“Not a problem.” For me anyway. Wait’ll Samantha smells them.
Dagne resisted the urge to throw the phone across the room, poured a glass of water, and sat down on the kitchen chair to torture herself once again. Jack. Talk about a catch. Not. When she met him, he had no job, no money, no goals, not even a car. He’d depended all his life on “the kindness of strangers”—strangers, as she’d explained to poor Lovelorn, meaning women. Oh, Jack had a way with him. In the early months of their relationship they made love like rabbits, each coupling holding fresh delights. Dagne had never before felt so alive, so much a woman, as she did with him. She took to buying sexy lingerie for the first time in her life, just to please him, even though he insisted she bought them for herself. He believed it, too. She only understood afterward that he couldn’t conceive of a person doing something solely for the sake of another.
She loved him. She still loved him. But as crisis followed crisis, as need appeared, he didn’t. Oh yes, he wrote sympathetic emails galore, vomiting advice in a self-satisfied way. Then, regrets, he had a standing happy hour he must attend.
Prick.
Her mind went back even earlier, to the time after her divorce became final. She remembered it as such a joyous period—only thirty-one, free as a bird, plenty of money, ready to fly. She talked her friend Polly into offering her a gig with the Alexandria Observer for an advice column. “Dear Philomena” proved to be a winner for the paper, not to mention for her bank account. She had her mother to thank for that. The little angel—Dagne used that term advisedly—had straightened to her full five feet, slapped her tiny beringed hands together in a typically Gallic gesture, and nagged, “I’m tired of you moping around, ma petite. Get off your bum and do something useful. Something salutaire for mankind—and more profitable than those trashy novels of yours.”
One day her neighbor, Marian, asked her to come along to a bar and meet her gang. “Now, Dagne,” she explained before they entered, “these kids are all singles and all wanting to be. No one’s allowed to bring a date. You know, leave the main squeeze at home so we can be ourselves and relax.”
It struck Dagne as a trifle adolescent, but after all, she told herself, “I’m single, too, aren’t I? And loving it too, right?” So she walked into the Pines of Tyrol that evening prepared for a good time. This guy Jack swiveled on his barstool to check her out and was all over her before she even had a chance to sit down. The lines poured out of him as thick and fast as buckshot from a blunderbuss. She stifled the urge to roll her eyes and instead batted her lashes at him. Go ahead, mate. Drool over me.
At first, it didn’t matter what kind of man she’d taken up with, since it wasn’t actually Jack who obsessed her, but the idea of escape, of finding—by some miracle—a lover who would take her under his wing and free her from all her old phobias. She clung to Jack to avoid the abyss of terror she scrabbled frantically to keep from tipping into—the one she opened up when she walked out of her marriage. She took one look at the sudden emptiness of her life and flung herself at him like a whore in a Fifth Avenue boutique with a rich man’s wallet. She pretended to her friends and relatives, and especially to herself, that she loved him.
“You insisted you loved him,” her mother accused. “You expected me to believe you. Ha. I knew better — you figured you’d found a ledge to land on, didn’t you? But you know and I know — not to mention two thousand other women, that Jack’s a—”
“Mother! Okay, okay. Yes, that was true at first. Trouble is, my plan didn’t work, did it?”
Unfortunately for Dagne, Jack fell into the class of Lothario whose unwavering pursuit lasts right up to the minute he reels the fish in. And he sure reeled you in, didn’t he, Dagne my girl? Tossed her, the hook, the line, and the sinker into his creel and promptly lost interest. She didn’t, though. Not a minute went by since then when she didn’t think of him.
“Yes,” her mother would remark in an offhand little murmur that always grated on Dagne, “but with pain, always with pain.”
Which was why, three years and six months later, Dagne still found herself conjuring up whimsical visions of nuptial bliss while meticulously pouring Tabasco sauce on Jack’s underwear, which she would then swish around with his sweatshirt for Samantha’s benefit.
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