Love at first sight

I am a wandering academic who has settled down in Wyoming. As I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, it is still surprising to find myself surrounded by miles of prairie and mountain ranges but I love the sky, the open spaces and even the wind that is our inevitable companion. In this blog, I want to talk about life out in the West, my two guilty pleasures, romance novels and the World of Warcraft, authors and their books, and anything else that comes to mind. I hope I will be soon joined by my sister, a mom of three boys and a pre-school teacher. I thought I would start by talking about what brought a nice girl from Brooklyn out to the wilds of Wyoming.

Love at first sight

In the classic division of ways of love between the sexes, women are not supposed to fall in love at first sight. Men are. And then, if all goes well, women oblige by falling back in love with them. An Egyptian friend, an up and coming scientist, proposed to two Egyptian women from good families on first sight. The first fiancée broke up with him while he was away in the United States at grad school but the second married him and moved to America for life with a young professor making his way in the world. My Brooklyn Irish Catholic father fell for my Oxford-educated English mother the moment he met her at a party. My devout brother prayed to God for a wife. He met her when she was visiting the church with her parents. Because he knew this was the woman for him, he had the confidence to stick it through a first date where she (who is often shy) gave him monosyllabic answers to his questions. He was absolutely right, she is a lovely woman and a perfect match for him.

In this world of the internet, it is as easy to find a partner half a continent away as next door, but basic human instincts to love remain the same. What has changed is that the people we meet in person or in the ether world will often have a much broader range of views and cultural characteristics than those of our ancestors from tight knit communities. Even those that traveled thousands of miles to new worlds often married people from home. My Irish grandmother who emigrated to Brooklyn married a man she had known since childhood, another Irish emigrant. Love at first sight works when you know what will make you happy and you can recognize those qualities in others. As multitudes of failed relationships have showed, we are not necessarily born with the quality. A friend who liked tall gregarious men found happiness only when she allowed herself to fall in love with a short gentle man.

I have my father’s and brother’s ability to know, to recognize what I want in friends or a lover. It is a tricky gift. I am big and tall and loud, not the feminine ideal for many men. I have had my heart broken over the years because men did not fall in love with me back or relationships did not work out. I have also rejected a number of good men because I did not feel that spark I knew I needed from true love. I live in Wyoming because the first time I saw a post by R.J. on a chatboard for George RR Martin, author of wonderful bloody 1000 page novels, I knew I could fall in love with him. He understood the limitations of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series, that Chaos Theory completely invalidated claims of predicting the future. He was a man that could talk both science and literature. He could talk about wind turbines and write hysterically funny doggrel about his cat. I know these are not a typical requirements of most lovers but they were essential to me. I needed someone understand both parts of my training, both parts of the mind that worked so hard to develop.

Given he was a stranger from a chatboard, lived a 1000 miles away from me, and was seven years younger, I felt quite foolish falling for a man I had never even seen a picture of. But I was right. We chatted and flirted on line for a year and a half. I moved from one state to another, dated various people who I liked but who could never be “the one”. After years of living in dingy basement apartments, he broke ground and began to build his own house. I filed him firmly under “Could love but wouldn’t work” until the death of a friend on the chatboard changed the conversation, heightened all emotions. When he signed a letter “love,” I threw caution to the winds and took a summer vacation to Colorado and Wyoming. We had a meal at the local hamburger place, dug his septic trench, walked in the Snowy Mountains and have been together ever since. After a long distance relationship for four years, I packed up all my belongings in a Ryder truck and moved here.

Love is never perfect, but starting from that flash of love from the very start can let one (woman or man) know why they are in the relationship and let them survive the fiercest of storms. But it only works if one instinctively knows what one actually needs, rather than what one thinks one wants. A different matter altogether.