Love Lost and Self-Esteem

There just never seems to be a good way to break up. No matter how we humans try, it usually ends up a ragged affair. The problem then becomes: How can we know we are over the last relationship when somebody new shows up in our lives, and wants to connect? If the old thing isn't resolved emotionally, how can anything new grow in its place?

This, of course, is what every cheater discovers. Yes, it is extremely exciting to conduct a secret affair. But, it's actually sort of like running up a big credit card bill. The day will come when you have to pay it off, and the price may prove to be more than you're able to pay.

I'm speaking about the emotional costs, obviously.

Since I've made every mistake I could think of in my life, maybe my perspective could be useful. Here is what I've learned:

*When you are the one who breaks it off with your partner, you're going to continue to feel guilty until you see they have landed into a new relationship, or you can convince yourself that it was really their fault you broke up, through some sort of elaborate rationalization you construct for yourself.

*When you are the one who is dumped, you get cut to your core. What is at risk is not necessarily your desire to reclaim that lost relationship, but your belief in yourself to be able to ever again find a new one.

(Am I right here? Comments appreciated.)

Ultimately, in order to get healthy again, we have to heal ourselves after losses. Then, some fine day, we can move on. We can meet a stranger and feel like we've known her forever. In other words, we can fall in love again.

But the balance between the one who leaves and the one who is left behind is fragile and hazardous. I know for my part, I seek to find that place of continuity that allows me and those I've loved to go forward in harmony, mutually supportive but understanding that we both will now make separate choices.

I don't believe it is possible to go backwards in life. What is over is over, period. But our emotions take a long time to heal. They must heal for us to have any shot at a decent new beginning. This process of transitioning out of and into new relationships acquires an urgency as we grow older that can be terrifying at times.

If you are the one who left, you have one set of burdens. They are terrible -- both the guilt and the sadness can easily overwhelm you. I know this in ways that are almost too painful to bring up, but (being me), I will.

I left my first wife. Our three children were still young. I left her for reasons I could not easily articulate, but they amounted to something fuzzy like I thought she wouldn't really care if I left.

But I was wrong. She did care, and my leaving dealt her a terrible blow. It was made much worse by the fact that I left her for another. That person became my second wife.

Many men have lived this story. Many women have too.

During the long, painful transition, I often found myself torn between two cities, in this case Mill Valley and San Francisco. Saturdays were the worst. I always went out to Mill Valley to see my children. As the day slipped toward night, I always had to leave, to rejoin my partner in the city.

I did what I had to do, and what felt at the time like the right thing to do. But many more times than any of them would want to know, I drove on 101 South and across the Golden Gate Bridge with tears streaming down my face. I never, ever felt good about what had happened to us all.

By the time I saw the one I loved so much that I sacrificed living with my first family to help her achieve her dreams, which included creating my second one, I hid my tears and opened my smile. But the contradiction of living this dual emotional reality took its toll, eventually, and I developed some really bad coping strategies.

It's always a bad sign about me when I start reeling off meaningless mathematical calculations to myself as I drive down a highway, sit in a meeting, or contemplate a room, any room, and its particular characteristics. It's not a good time to be trapped inside my particular mind, which inevitably starts adding up angles and calculating square roots, and fills itself with additions and multiplications that (as my second wife often said) border on the musings of an autistic.

For what it is worth, this is how my mind behaves when I am tense. I see some image, say a highway sign, and I quickly calculate its components, according to some set of pre-determined factors that only my visual memory can recite. Then, the pattern begins, for example (to cite the simplest of many)...1,2,4,8,16,32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 33768...see waht I mean? That takes me much less time than my fingers require to type, and it has always been so.

What this is is an obsessive, compulsive attempt at imposing order on a life where there is none.

I know that now. I know that the cerebral life competes with the emotional life in a struggle that often deterines our physical health. I just wish I could stop reverting to this type of coping startegy as I attempt to navigate the unknown and scary emotional territory of what I call the Third Act of my life.

I'm not young anymore and I never again will be. But I have plenty of energy left, lots of things I want to do, places I want to go, languages I want to learn, accomplishments I hope to achieve.

This Christmas, I am traveling to Japan. This will be my third visit there. The Japanese fascinate me. I love their language, their culture, and their food. Americans have a lot we could learn from Japanese, and vice versa. As I was booking my ticket, over two days, I couldn't help complimenting the two female booking agents, as they walked me through the itinerary and credit card processes in English. They both had a lot of trouble, for instance, pronouncing "Portland," which is where my connecting flight will take me from Oakland to Narita.

They both thanked me in English and I thanked them in Japanese. They both then complimented me for my accent. Some Americans make fun of Japanese people for what to our eyes appears to be their excessive politeness. And I am wuite sure, if I were Japanese, I would feel the burden of giri to be much more than I was willing to bear.

But when I am in Tokyo, I hope to rediscover a different feeling, one that dates back over 20 years, and that is the commitment to walk lighter on this earth. I want to experience again how it can be to live in a smaller place, eating less food, taking up less room.

Why? Because we Americans live the most undisciplined lives on this planet. We do not even want to know how many of the world's finite natural resources we consume per capita. It is too gross. On my previous trips, Japan taught me modesty, and reminded me of my essential values, not those that somehow sneak in against my will inside the borders of the bloated U.S of A.

I hope this is the first of many return trips to places that have taught me things. My daughter's wedding in the south of France next August will be one such opportunity. But I wish to return to many places, all over the planet, that have taught me and made me into the person, and the writer, I am.

Plus, there are a few new ones on my radar.

Meanwhile, I had better get back to my calculations if I am to have any hope of paying for all of this!