After the love has gone

The strong winds we've had in the area recently blew my satellite dish out of kilter and, consequently, I've been without television for the past two weeks waiting for DirecTV to come and reposition it. This has not been a good experience but I'll write about that at a later date. The outage, however, has given me the chance to watch some DVD's I haven't seen in a while.

Last night I watched a concert DVD featuring Earth, Wind, and Fire performing with Chicago at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. It was an okay concert by both groups until EW&F did one of their all-time classic hit songs, "After The Love Has Gone."

Music has a way of getting under our skin and touching us at our very core and this song has done that for me over and over again throughout the decades. Music can often soothe the soul of the savage beast within us and unite one and all in a commonly shared experience and this particular song does it as well as any ever has.

Most all of us have had love in our lives at one time or another. With some it was fleeting, for others it was enduring, and, for a rare few, its everlasting. I fall somewhere in the middle of the second option and even though there was a chance to progress to the third, it just didn't happen. Love failed me and deserted me when I needed it the most and I suspect I will never pass that way again.

One of the great joys in my life has been to teach the new class I offered this semester at McCook Community College called the Sociology of Love and Relationships. I ended up with 20 students in a class that isn't listed in the course catalog, a class that has never been taught before, a class that won't meet any general education requirements and a class that might not even be transferable to some four-year college and universities and yet 20 students made up their own minds to take it. As it turned out, the age range in the class spans some 50 years. I never dread going to school and walking into a classroom because it's the one thing that keeps me young and alive but this particular class is unlike any other I've ever taught, thanks primarily to the people who chose to take it.

They look to me for answers to the world's most perplexing problems: Can I find someone to love me like I love them? How do I know it will last? What can I do to make it last? Are there any guarantees? What are the danger signs to look for? How do I know I'm not being taken advantage of? How do I know this person isn't a player? What if they're one person while I'm dating them and another person after I marry them? How do I know how they'll treat me? What if they turn out to be bad for me instead of good for me? And the questions go on and on and on.

If I had taught this class while I was still married, I could have given answers to these questions that were much more definitive than the answers I'm able to give now. I thought my wife and I had solved all the world's great riddles when it came to having a long-term happy, loving relationship with another person.

But that turned out to not be so.

Since then I have had other relationships that I held out the greatest hope and optimism for but they didn't work out either. One thing my ex-wife never ever did was to lie to me or deceive me in any way shape or form and, because of that, I didn't think anyone else would either. How wrong I was. I believed with all my heart that any woman I had a relationship with would work for the best of us but they didn't. They worked for the best of them and I had had no experience with that at all.

So what is one to do? As the months turn into years; the days get shorter, the nights grow longer and the opportunities become fewer. If your heart is broken when you're young, even though the pain is the same regardless of how old you are, you eventually get up off the floor and try it again. If you're older, sometimes you just die.

So now instead of answering all of those serious, penetrating questions with definitive answers, I often have to respond to them with questions of my own rather than answers they can depend on. Maybe that's progress, maturity, or reality on my part but one thing I've found is that there is no one size that fits all when it comes to love and relationships. Each person is different and consequently every relationship is different. What works for some won't work for others and no relationship comes with a money-back guarantee.

You put yourself out there when you take a chance on love and, because you do, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. That's the way it is in every aspect of our lives and love is no different.

Loving and losing is a painful, lonely experience that we may not have even attempted had we known how it was going to end up.

But of course we don't know. No one who's in love gets married thinking about when they're going to get a divorce. No one who falls in love ever considers the possibility that the other person might stop loving them, or even worse, never loved them to begin with.

"We risk it all, no matter what may come, when we love someone." (Bryan Adams