Is Love Just a Fairy Tale?
A Construction Worker's Slow Passage to Real Love
The more love you give away, the more love you will have.
John O'Donohue, Anam Ćara*
This is a true story.
6:45AM
An empty lot in a new housing development. 1987. I stood in my unlaced work boots atop a mound of fresh gravel, surveying the excavated pit that stretched before me. The rising sun cast a shadow across half this sunken dirt dais, and brightened the other half in a warm reddish yellow. My job today, along with a crew of four or five others, would be to carry into this pit the dozens of oil-stained plywood-and-steel panels that were now stacked on the back of a flat-bed truck parked by the side of the hole. We would hammer them into place with steel pins, and the panels would quickly begin to take the shape of a rectangular rampart: a facsimile of a future house foundation. This was concrete form-work.
The rest of the crew would arrive any moment, exchanging puckish greetings, tossing their empty coffee cups into the pit, and bustling to work, showing off how many 80-pound forms they could carry at once. The concrete truck would be scheduled for a mid-afternoon pour, and by early evening we would be troweling wet cement at the narrow top edge of the wall, and then covering the whole thing with plastic sheeting for the night. The next day we would strip the forms, load them back onto the truck, and move on to the next job. Such was my life at twenty-three.
I turned around, skidded down the backside of the mound, and got back into my car.
Twenty Minutes Later
My one-bedroom apartment. I was in my work clothes still. She lay snuggled under the covers, rubbing sleep from her eyes. I had just gently squeezed her foot to awaken her.
“Let’s go to Disney World,” I said.
“Um. Today?” she asked.
“Yeah, today.”
She hesitated for only a moment or two. “Okay.” She smiled.
“Let’s go then,” I said.
She tossed the covers back and we started packing.
The Best Thing
I was surprised she’d said yes. She’d recently started a new job answering phones at a manufacturing plant. But she liked her job about as much as I liked mine, which is to say, not at all. By mid-morning we were driving south on U.S Route 95 through Connecticut. We stopped at a rest area, where she used a pay phone to call work and deliver a rehearsed story of a family emergency. I made no such call (I did summon the courage to phone the construction office a few weeks later and ask for my last paycheck, which they grudgingly mailed).
For the next week or so we pretended we were free. We knew we would have to find new jobs as soon as we got back. But for now, we were on an adventure without misgivings. Neither of us had ever taken a vacation on our own, without parents. I don’t think she’d been out of New England. The Florida landscape was so exotic, with all those palm trees and condos and fruit stands. We actually drove my little Ford Escort on the beach! A thunderstorm passed over once and we saw a lightning bolt strike the highway in a blazing flash of blue. We found a sandy campsite at a state park. Entrance to the Magic Kingdom was twenty-five dollars each. I put it on my credit card.
I still have the ticket stubs.
J. was five years younger than I, which means, yes, I was breaking the law when we first met, though I never thought of it that way. (Luckily, her mom was relaxed about it, perhaps a bit distracted. There’d been no dad for about ten years; he’d headed off to the bar one day and never returned). Now, we were legal, free, and in love.
Or at least I think we were in love.
We had a dreamy time in Florida. Like a fairy tale.
Ten years later, when our divorce was imminent and she was telling me all the reasons I was such a bad husband and father, I said, “What about our trip to Disney World?” A reminder that we did share something special once. I still considered it one of the best things we’d ever done.
“That was one of the dumbest things we ever did,” she said.
Innocence
I remember like it was yesterday the first time I touched the smooth skin just below her collarbone. We were picnicking on a blanket by a pond, hidden from public view by some shrubs and trees. I slid my hand down the front of her lacy white tank top. We were both virgins, and would remain so for a little while yet. Her skin was so soft. Like silk. I think that’s what did it for me. How could you voluntarily walk away from something like that?
She didn’t like to read and she didn’t do very well at school. Couldn’t wait to graduate. My previous girlfriend, who was the president of her high school freshman class when we first met and was still a friend, didn’t understand why I was with J. She speculated that I needed to “take care of someone.” Perhaps she was right. J. was diffident and bashful; when we lived together, I took care of the bills, called the credit card companies, drove to the store for milk.
My father was big, strong, stable; a rock. He built bridges for a living. I suppose I was unconsciously replicating the role.
It wasn’t long before I began to feel that something was missing. I did try to break up with her once. We were already sharing an apartment, and she desperately didn’t want to return to her mother’s house.
“You don’t have to love me,” she begged. “Just don’t leave me!”
I capitulated.
And Then the Babies Came
Not all women feel the call to motherhood, but many do, and J. was one. But we were so young! I wish I’d understood how young I was. I mean, we were twenty-seven and twenty-two when our first child was born, a daughter, so we weren’t teen parents or anything. But still, before the pregnancy, I wasn’t sure I was ready to be a father. She responded to my hesitancy with anger; she took it as a betrayal. I assumed my fear was a fault, a sign of my immaturity. I bucked up. We bought a thermometer and learned about the temperature method.
Something about motherhood, I think. Or more likely something about her expectations of what fathers do (they leave). It was no longer you and me against the world; it was now us against the world; except us was herself and the kids. Us no longer included me.
What is Love Anyway?
John O’Donohue, in Anam Ćara, writes, “Love is our deepest nature.” But the Irish poet and philosopher also understood that “no one can hurt you as deeply as the one you love.” He goes on:
When you meet only at the point of poverty between you, it is as if you give birth to a ghost who would devour every shred of your affection.
Perhaps we both fell victim to that impoverished ghost.
Love. I didn’t have a clue. I knew I was searching for it, was hungry for it. I found this in my journal, written three days before our wedding. I was twenty-four:
I’ve learned a lot about myself, and feelings that I never knew I had, my ability to love. I’ve only recently given in to my need for someone to lean on. I need J. But I also love her. And this real love that I’ve learned so much about has taken me completely by surprise. Because I love her for no reason but love itself. My real love comes from somewhere within...
Seven short years later I wrote this: “You know what love is? It’s four letters that make up a word that stands for a thousand rotten things...”
Awakening
In the decades since, with the maturity of age and lots of introspection, I’ve come to understand a few things about love.
Love is generosity—a giving, not a taking—and it grows only in a heart that feels safe and whole.
Love cannot come out of clinging or fear or illusions of scarcity. Many of us feel that giving too much of ourselves is a risk, that we are a limited resource and must protect ourselves from a menacing world that would exploit and drain us if we let it, if we open our hearts too much. We fear there would be nothing left for ourselves. We feel vulnerable. We feel scared. We feel vigilant, jealous; protective of this entity we call “self.”
We can’t love because we don’t understand what an unlimited resource we actually are. Our connection to the energy of the earth and of the universe—to the ultimate source of life—means we can never be depleted. We are like an electric power line. The love that courses through us is unlimited, renewable, and not ours. We just channel it. Our fears, which come of a too-narrow view of self, clog up that line.
Mindfulness—honest, non-judgmental self-reflection—is like a stint, opening things up so the love can flow. Love is no longer conditional when the giver realizes their wholeness, and needs nothing in return. A person who understands that they are an integral part of an infinite and eternal whole understands that the more love you give, the more you have. Their love, then, is generous, spontaneous, and true.
That’s the kind of foundation I’m building these days. Steel-toed work shoes not required.
*O’Donohue, John. Anam Ćara. Harper Perenial, 2022 (Making a purchase via this link will help keep the content on Shy Guy Meets the Buddha free for everyone and will also help support independent bookstores. Thank you for your support!)
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I truly love your writing! You create a most delicious combination of innocence and wisdom, vulnerability and strength. Thank you from my heart 💜
I love that you're sharing these intimate parts of who you are. It's vulnerable and precious. I hold your stories with compassion and admire your courage to share.