Crazy in Love
Was it a single spectacular moment when your eyes locked?
Or was it more like a highly combustible jolt, a steamy slow swoon or a reckless
and ravaged abandon that left you jittery, catatonic, unhinged.
Losing your heart, losing your head — crazy in love.
It can happen in an instant. It can last a lifetime, a fortnight or a subway ride.
Tell us. Tell us everything. Every breathless little detail. Steel yourself with a swift shot of whatever’s in your tumbler and post to the world about the first time, the best time, the most jaw-dropping time you fell in love.
EA toasts Valentine’s Day. Let those arrows fly.
The Errant Æsthete 
The first time was really the only time. And it was a fastball I never saw coming. I fell “in like” first: he was sweet, handsome, and sincere. A really good friend I was delighted to get to know. And then there was that night driving home after a few cocktails and a lot of conversation that our goodnight became a kiss. Swoon! Twenty five years later, twenty of them in marriage, he is still my one true love and my very best friend.
I understand the whole “like” thing. I have recently met a guy who day by day I like more and more. I haven’t told him yet but I feel that I’m going to tell him very soon. But nobody will understand your specific story because each one is different
We were introduced through a then mutual friend and it was like oil and water. However, a few years later we met again through a job interview and we connected. That was 1983 and four years later, because of a long distant relationship and lots of phone calls, we got engaged at the San Francisco airport via phones in booths next to each other. This May I will celebrate 20 years of being married to my best friend, Anna.
I knew him for about three years before I really noticed him, if that makes any sense. He was a friend, someone to talk to. Then he became a shoulder to cry on. Next he became someone I looked forward to talking to EVERY day – someone to flirt with. I didn’t see it until someone else asked me and then I knew – I wanted to be a part of his life … forever. According to him, at that point I attacked him with our first kiss. Oh well, no one ever called me a shrinking violet. After five and a half years of marriage my worst days are the ones in which he has to work overnights and I have to go to bed … and wake up alone.
I met him in a darkened stairwell in an apartment building on Riverside Drive in New York. The power had gone out in the city a short time earlier following a storm that left the neighborhood and the building strangely quiet, plummeting everything into darkness with its labyrinth of long hallways and bolted doors resembling a darkened tomb, a crypt of unnatural silence. I had been on my way out to meet friends and luckily managed to find a half burned candle in the corner of a drawer to guide my way through this blanketed world of black.
I was making my way down the stairs traveling to the depths of what seemed certain hell, gripping the rail, tentatively reaching for each step, holding the candle like a beacon summoning the forces of good in my stead when suddenly, I was startled to see a shape moving up towards me. His head was bowed and he, too, was groping in the dark, reaching for some semblance of the familiar, while clutching a basketball tightly under his arm. He had on shorts and a tee shirt and appeared both winded and wet. Obviously, he had been shooting hoops in the court across the street, and when he looked up, his face illuminated in the light of the candle, I saw a young, attractive and somewhat anxious guy making his way through the unknown.
For years, the phrase ‘two ships passing in the night’ summed up that moment for me with the kind of precision and clarity you find in novels, movies and dreams. It was sudden, immediate, and in that small narrow space, breathtakingly intimate. We laughed at our plight, giddy with uncertainty, nervous in this completely unnatural setting of no introduction, no social guidelines, no light (forgive the pun) of civility, reality or ritual to fall back on. But unlike the ships anonymously passing each other in the distance, I gave him the candle and my apartment number where he might return it, so we could suspend this unspeakable thrill, relish this anticipation, cleave this kismet that fate had seen fit to bestow upon us. And we did. And we do all these many years later. Love at first sight. Most certainly, yes.
I’m in love with him and he doesn’t even know it. He thinks we’re “just friends”. A forbidden sort of love, I can only admire him from a distance. So close, and yet … so far. Forever, so far. Unrequited love.
What a relief someone else brought up “unrequited love.” I’ve been there for seven months and nearly broke my silence once, but lost my nerve. I know he honestly enjoys me and my company, but romantic? Last weekend, I happened to catch Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park on PBS’ Masterpiece Theater. What a comfort to discover one of the story’s prime characters, Fanny Price, who had loved Edmund Bertram since she was a child. Not only was he smitten with another woman but had confessed it all to Fanny. I don’t want to reveal the plot, but it’s well worth seeing. One great line stayed with me: “We all have our best guides within us, if only we would listen.”
This comment is for Isabella — thanks for writing in response to what I had written. It was a relief and a comfort to me, too!! What is it with men??! I don’t seem to ever hear about “unrequited love” the other way around … that is to say, I’ve never heard of a man pining for a woman who doesn’t know that the man is secretly in love with her. Have you ever heard of such a thing?? Anyway, I recently decided to give up on the object of my affections and just move on. He didn’t seem to notice, which confirmed what I suspected all along. The hell with him. It’s HIS LOSS!! Thanks again for replying to my comment!
“What is it with men??! I don’t seem to ever hear about “unrequited love” the other way around …”
Well Claire you have now because I’m in that situation and it’s a private living hell. She is/was a long time friend, it took eight years to fall for her and I kept quiet for another eight years fearing I had little to gain and everything to lose. Then I made the fatal mistake of taking advice from another female friend and let her know how I feel and everything turned to shit.
I haven’t heard from her for eight months and I’m fairly certain we are no longer friends but I still love her more than life itself and always will and every day it gnaws away, it’s never ending. She is the only one I want to be with and the only one I would ever commit to but it’s impossible.
Unfortunately for me I can’t just move on and forget her. I have been fighting this for ten years and it’s hopeless. I can have a girlfriend but I will never be able to commit because I’ll never love anyone else.
We met in high school. When we left for college (she to NY, I to California) we knew the odds were against us and made no promises. Yet, every single day we felt like writing long letters to each other; every single day we decided to be faithful to each other despite all the local temptations; day in and day out, one day at a time. That was 38 years ago. We have been happily married over 30 years. Two children. Each and every morning when we wake up it is worth it all over again. Brick by brick by brick.
Dear Condemned: I’m really sorry to hear your story. Forgive me for saying that you never hear about unrequited love “the other way around”. I hope that someday you can find peace, and that someday you’ll find someone who makes your heart sing. In the meantime, look at it this way: like I said in one of my other comments, IT’S HER LOSS!!! Right?? If she can’t recognize all the wonderful things you are, then that’s her problem. Also, there has to come a point where you look at the situation a bit more objectively and just make up your mind that it’s not worth your time, energy and heartache to want to be with someone who just plain isn’t interested in you. That’s the realization I had to come to with my situation. Good luck, Condemned.
We all have our best guides within us, if only we would listen.”
– Jane Austin. What happens when you don’t quite understand what that inner voice is telling you? It can be quite murky, almost like a radio station on the dial that doesn’t quite come in all the way and all you get are snippets of words in seemingly random order.
I date a man occasionally who flies in on business. We’ve been doing this for a year and a half now. Both single, both available and yet, it’s always an add-n to a business trip with little contact inbetween visits. He says he loves me, what does that mean to him? I too have the fear mentioned above. teh fear of losing a wonderful, sweet, intense, possibly life long connection with someone to fatally openeing my mouth and voicing all I want to say. I adore this man and I want him every minute of every hour of every day. However is it worth the risk of losing this tenuous bond over my unrequited feelings of unabashed love, soaring intoxicating passion? I could spend the rest of my life with him and it would never be enough. So, so far, I bite my tongue. I am unsure of the answers he would give to my questions. I date others in between visits, but always hold out for the off-chance he will say, enough of this. I want you forever and that starts Now!
Waiting longingly for eros in my intimacy free marriage. I finally met with someone who has been my good friend for 14 years. We both know the score on affairs and yet she has helped me to slowly unlock the intimate emotional side of life which has been lacking for so many years. At first only a fleeting hug…but a knowledge that yes…someone does find me attractive. Then on a visit separated by weeks, the first kiss filled with longing. And we left it at that followed slowly with more touching, a sensual foot rub, and satisfying emotional cuddling. where it will lead is unknown but the re-exploration of passion after so many years of marriage gone cold has rewarmed my soul.
Crazy in love
Maybe it started soon after my arrival in Amman, but probably his picture had already affected my soul far before my departure from Basel, Switzerland, directed to the Jordanian capital. It may have started during those endless hours lounging with him in a smart café, infused with the languor and sensuousness of a modern and lavish Arabian setting, sipping my coffee while watching through the window towards the new-built bridge, glittering in all his grand posture among the hypnotic somersaults of smoke wafting up from my shisha. Or perhaps it started during our first walk downtown Amman on my very first day when I asked him to show me the surrounding area and his name was already whispering in my mind like desert wind, when I understood that I was thoroughly and truly smitten with him– Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona – a verse which after so many years of studying and researching I could now understand in all his drama and deep emotion.
I wish I could…but by now everything is over and he’s still calling me by his name, wind of the desert…
Stat rosa pristine nomine, nomina nuda tenemus
the abyss also peers into you……
“abissus abissum invocat”
Io sono fatto, ho dentro un abisso che chiama l’abisso, ho un infinito che chiama l’infinito. Son fatto per questo…
I am so late with this, however, I forge ahead. The sweetest taboo. We worked on a project together, it was around this time of the year in ’97. We went, separately to the holiday party, still colleagues, clueless to the passion that lie ahead. He was reading Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage and offered to lend it to me, I responded that I didn’t “want to intrude” but would love to read it when he finished, as I’d just viewed the PBS documentary and it was breath taking. A voicemail message followed, him saying…”You’ve already intruded, and you’re welcome to stay…I will speak to you later, the sooner the better…” his voice took my breath away, he looked exaclty like Jon Hamm’s character on Mad Men, exactly. There followed seven years of the most imaginable passiona and beautiful love you could ever imagine, and then he broke my heart, he married a complete stranger he’d only known for five months. Cruel, as Stevie Wonder sang…”he took me riding in a rocket gave me a star, about a half a mile from heaven, he dropped me down to this cold, cold world.
Italia,
So exquisitely moving. Thank you. A wonderful close with the lyrics from “Cruel” and it was.
i am in love really crazy..for me ,you can not understand when you feel love deeply what is the limit,you can never feel until try..you want to tell everybody in the earth because you feel really happy some flowers open in your heart but in the same time you feel fear of losing him ,devil eyes..i love one guy but it is so desperate..
Being born with an ardent taste for the exquisite, I fall in love and have my heart broken almost every day. On the subway, in the street, at shop counters…. there are soooo many beautiful women in the world!
I have never seen such beautiful eyes. Heavy-lidded, sensual, erotic eyes. These are the eyes that I have sought all my life. And the woman who possesses these eyes, and has stolen my soul, will never be mine.
I have just read Mario Vargas Llosa’s book, “The Bad Girl”. It is a story – is it real? – of being crazy in love. It is love at first sight and at last, it is sex and submission and completely insane, but told from the perspective of one of the most sane and beutiful, nice-guy character’s I’ve read about. Have you read it?
I love my wife. Its as simple and complex, romantic while irrationally practical as that. We met in college 35 years ago when she was on a date with a fraternity brother. I knew with the first words from her mouth that this was a person…THE person I would love till the day I died. It took me a while to convince her that she should go out with me let alone spend a life with me. I’m 5’4” and she is 5’10’. A statuesque beauty so far out of my league that all of my friends laughed at me. People stared (and still do) when we walked together holding hands. I was afraid this difference would be my undoing, but on our first date when everyone laughed as I jumped up on a park bench to kiss her good night I knew she was mine. She still is. After 32 years of a marriage that has survived Military flight school, medical school, 3 children, 5 different businesses, the reconstruction of a house and several men who have been blinded enough by her wit and charm to try to woo her away right in front of me I can still say with complete candor that I not only love her more every day, I lust her more every day.
My own father on our wedding day told me I was marrying above my species and he was right. And I am right in saying that upon the day that either of us dies, the other may breath on but will cease to live.