Failed Attempts

If therapy has shown me anything, it’s not to regret the past, but to find good in all of it… even in failed attempts (The Justin Ferrin Song,by the same name, is a fave of mine).

Nelson was very funny. He had a sense of humor and tried to do right. He gobbled up the Bible and even though his sense of leadership was woefully misguided, he wanted to do well.

His curls were legendary and his twitching lip was precious. I liked his feet, and legs. He liked mint body-wash and that was cute, too.

We always thought the world was so small, so limiting, but we were trying to be happy – even amidst a wreck of a home and a mess. He did try to provide for me, even through his foolish attempts to appease what he thought I wanted.

I loved Nelson with my whole heart and his mental illness coupled with the violence he learned over the years, smashed and splintered what was left of our decade-long marriage. One of my saddest regrets is that I was trying to make it work and he wouldn’t get help so he could try too.

There is a part of me that will always always always love what I thought we shared together. He had a beautiful heart when it wasn’t messed up and psycho.

And now I know…. Nel’s lack of following his dreams for fear of being unsuccessful and my lack of support is what I learned – that the thing I’ve been doing all along – following my childhood dreams is what makes me happiest!

Mister Wonderful, on the other hand, showed me more passion in 3 years, than I’d felt in the previous 30… with the possible exception of a high-school boyfriend that I loved, but who the timing was all wrong, with. Our infatuation for one another grew to an ardor that I could scarcely explain in words. In my whole life – let alone in my 30s (not my teens) – never did I expect to be so powerful with feeling toward a single man.

Since we fell in love over the phone (his company was a client of mine), there was absolutely no physical attraction. We didn’t even meet for nearly a year. When asked by my sister what I saw in him, I said that we respected each other.

Yes, it’s true; I never said passion. We had a mutual love for our shared field of study… even a few other things. It lasted for 3 years but fell apart very quickly when it became apparent there was no common goals for the future.


Othello is the love that never should’ve been. When I decided to advertise on Match.com for a boyfriend, I said that I was looking for a friend first. Well I found a friend. We were involved for 10 months of which most was semi-miserable, but it kept me from being lonely.

The last six months we dated, we learned how to be friends. It broke my heart when we broke up, because although we were both very wrong for one another, if I hadn’t required that he be in love with me, we would have married and had kids. Because why? Because he was stable.

He taught me what it was to be normal, and that normal could be really satisfying. He often said “you deserve to be happy” or “you are a good person”. In retrospect, settling for him would have been the only mistake bigger than my marrying Nel.

The truth is that Othello ended up being both boring and passive-aggressive, with a total and complete lack of intimacy. But I was still settling down from the anger after my divorce, and it worked out nicely to have a dose of passion, and then stability before meeting the love of my life.

If this post were a musical, I'd now break into a chorus of "A Whole New World" from the musical cartoon movie, Aladdin.


Cuz now I'm in a whole new world with you....


Yeah... LaMar... woot. I'm finally feeling like letting all of that stuff go.

Dot.

P.S. After ruminating on this post for the weekend, I'm feeling really good about where things are going with LaMar. It upsets my mom that I change the names of all of the people on this blog, in order to protect the identity of the innocent... but LaMar is an amazing man and anyone who knows me in life, knows who he really is. No secrets there!