Sweet Hubby and me - Part One

                                                    THE SEARCH FOR LOVE

The desire to be loved has been the primary urge to shape my life.  I am loved by my family and friends, of course.  (That 'of course' illustrates how carelessly I took that kind of love for granted.)  I wanted romantic, partnership love.  I wanted a man to get to know me and decide his life would be better with me in it.  I wanted to feel safe and secure and not hungry all the time.

I certainly made every possible effort.  I dated all the time, with very little discrimination: skinny and ferret-y, tall and gorgeous, overweight, acne-scarred, intellectual, artsy, neurotic, needy, aloof.  I was three years with a man thirty years older and four years with a man fourteen years younger.  I kept working to reshape myself, to be funnier, smarter, more athletic, more charming.  I didn't really know how to be prettier, as I've never been interested in all that make-up and hair and cleavage business women are encouraged to adopt.  But I figured there were men who preferred au naturel, right?

I just couldn't figure out why that love was so elusive.  I may not have been the most beautiful, but I was certainly not the ugliest, not the stupidest, not the bitchiest.  I could get a man to want to date me, but it never seemed to stick.  At some point he (almost always he) would break it off and I'd be left wondering again "What's wrong with me?  How can I fix this fatal flaw if I don't know what it is?"  I got plenty of advice, of course: make a list, join a club, try the Internet, dye your hair, etc.  The most frequently offered was some version "It won't come to you unless you don't want it."  But I always insisted that a man could love me even if I wanted him to.

It probably didn't help that I was in Los Angeles chasing an acting career.  Au naturel doesn't play well in Hollywood.  Also, my social life was peopled in large part by gay men.  (At least I understood why they didn't want to marry me.) An awful lot of my girlfriends were in the same boat as I, single and frustrated and bewildered, so I didn't feel like a complete freak.  I understood that I was supposed to be happy with my life as it was, to be strong in my single-ness and satisfied with what I had.  But I knew that I wanted to be married, happily married, married for life.  I could never talk myself out of hoping for that.

When I finally healed from an especially bad break-up, I realized it was time for a change, a big change.  I was almost 50, yearning for adventure, discovery, fresh perspective.  I was ready to be new.    I had discovered myself as a writer, which freed me up to live somewhere else, so I left L.A. and moved to a family beach cottage on the central California coast.  There I had an intense relationship with a man who was a famous photographer, a lifelong peace activist, and, it turned out, a sex addict.  When that one also went kerplooey after the highest highs and lowest lows, I knew I had to move again.  There were pieces of him in every activity I engaged in, every friendship I had there.  At that point I could have lived anywhere in the world and, for reasons I have never understood, Seattle began to draw me with a mysterious magnetism.  I didn't know Seattle, didn't know anyone here, didn't have anything waiting for me.  But it's not a good idea to resist when the angels are calling, so I moved to the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and immediately fell in love with my new life. No one in L.A. ever talked about Seattle except as a kind of piney wilderness, so I moved here expecting to find nothing but lumberjacks and salmon fishermen.  Instead I discovered that Seattle is amazingly rich in arts and culture and I found a writing community right away.  I was even deliriously happy about the rain after the relentless sunshine of Los Angeles.  I was still single, still searching, but having a wonderful time.  

In 2005, I was accepted into a playwrighting conference in Denver.  Although I had been applying to writing conferences and retreats and residencies for a while, now that I'd been invited into one I hesitated to commit.  I was barely scratching out a living as an art model and real estate assistant, and wasn't sure how I would pay for airfare and hotel, rental car and food.  But some of my colleagues urged me to go anyway.  "We know you'll love it," they insisted.  "Just make up a reason to go."

"All right", I sighed, and gave the reason I went just about anywhere.  "Maybe I'll meet the love of my life."