I Want Something Different From Love This Time Around

I didn’t give much thought to what I wanted the first time I fell in love. I was young. I focused on what most people do at that age in life. Feelings. Nothing intellectual.

It was a feeling moving toward something.

Don’t get me wrong.

Feelings should move us.

Regardless of age they should move us. But I didn’t understand who I was, let alone what I was feeling. Looking back, it feels beyond adolescent. Yet young love works for many people.

It did not work for me.

My biggest epiphany came the day my sister relayed a conversation to me. She had gone to lunch with my husband. She was well-intentioned. They were close, and she understood the depth of our marital problems.

“What drew you toward Colleen?” she asked. “What did you love about her?”

My sister is insightful.

She believed this question would give my husband the type of clarity necessary to save our marriage. She thought it would make him understand what he felt about me.

His answer still rings within me.

“She was pretty and she had a lot of friends.”

Can you imagine how I felt?

What it felt like to realize I’d married a man who merely found me pretty and surrounded by friends? I was shocked. There was absolutely no depth in his attraction toward me.

More shocking?

It had taken decades to discover this.

The answer to one simple question.

As time moved on, my young love (marriage) felt empty.

I wanted something deeper. The kind of cavernous need that comes with age. I wanted something sensual. The kind of sensual intimacy we don’t understand in youth.

I wanted to be with a man I could spend hours in bed with.

It’s not what you’re thinking.

The kind of man I could snuggle next to and never let go of. The kind of man who would give his Saturday to me. The kind of man who wanted the depth of emotional intimacy.

I no longer wanted ‘companionship.’

‘Ships’ passing through their day to day lives.

Nor the man who’d chosen me for outward appearances.

I wanted something different from my relationship.

I met a man recently.

He’s been on my mind. It’s been a long time since a man preoccupied my thoughts. He’s not my person. He’s my moment. There are reasons for this.

Our age difference isn’t realistic.

And he’s just embarking on the second half of his journey. I’m too smart to let my emotions run away with a man who’s just emerging into his new beginning. He’s got things to experience. A whole world of things in front of him.

But I can’t deny one thing.

When I look at him I feel something.

When I talk to him I feel something.

I don’t know what that is.

I just know that something exists there.

The kind of thing that makes me want to move closer to him. The kind of thing that makes me want to spend more days with him. The kind of thing that makes me unable to fully explain it.

I just know that I want it.

I want him even if it’s for a moment in time.

He asked me a question recently.

“What stands out to you?”

He was referencing our time together.

It didn’t initially catch me off guard. Why would it? It’s a simple question. But it wasn’t. It had depth. The kind of depth I’d been unaware of in my youth.

The kind of depth I now craved.

It made sense…

Why I felt something when I looked at him.

He was offering me something I’d neglected when I was younger. He cared. He wanted to know my thoughts. He wanted to know what drove me as much as I wanted to know what drove him.

He wanted an exchange.

A back and forth.

A normalcy I’d never experienced.

The type of sensuality that comes with sharing ourselves…

With one other being.

I want something different from love this time around. The kind of thing that is shared. The kind of thing that makes you feel something. Not strictly physically.

The kind of thing that makes you look across a table at a man…

And think…

I feel something for him.

I’m not sure what…but I feel something.

The kind of feeling that moves you from youth to what you want to feel now.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.