You Leave Me ... Breathless

Everyone knows the symptoms: distracted thoughts, sweaty palms, fluttery stomach, permagrin.... Call it infatuation or call it love, the first stages of romance are not times of rational thought. Scientists have tried to quantify the transformation that takes place when humans discover mutual attraction -- hook someone in that condition up to electrodes and see the spikes in brain waves, heart rate, perspiration volume. Maybe they hope to build a wonder drug that will simulate those giddy emotions, but it seems to me that all the scientific jargon in the world is no match for new love.

I prided myself on being ruled by my head and not my heart -- I knew how to run every time those butterflies fluttered. But for some reason that I don't understand to this day, the butterflies he inspired were accompanied by a tremendous sense of calm. Paul Simon wrote a song called "Something So Right" that sums it up pretty well:

You've got the cool water when the fever gets high...

He made the butterflies feel like the most natural thing in the world, because he was feeling the same thing. We left an amazing e-mail trail during those first few heady months, one long, breathless message after another. I look back over them now and marvel at our journey of discovery. No topic was too mundane to dissect, no event was too trivial to catalog, no emotion was too raw to put out there....

He couldn't tell me enough times in a day that he loved me, or that I was the most beautiful woman in the world, or that I hung the moon. After years of being the cynical tough girl, I'm still not used to such abject flattery. I tend not to trust words, because by themselves, they are pretty much meaningless. Give me actions any day of the week.

And oh boy, did he have actions. We spent as much time as possible together those first few months. He constantly amazed me with his thoughtfulness, his attentiveness, his sweetness... everything he did seemed designed for maximum effect on whatever vestiges of resistence I might still harbor. I pinched myself black and blue to make sure I didn't dream this man. It's hard not to look back on it all as an elaborate bait-and-switch.

The chase, it seems, is much more important to him than the catch. And until he was sure that he had me, he was going to do everything in his power to win. It's not exactly that he lost interest after I surrendered, but the dynamic changed. Suddenly, it became less important to spend time together. It was okay if he didn't fill my in-box with love letters. It didn't matter that he forgot to bring flowers when he said he would. It was no big deal if he skipped my important work functions. And so on.

I would chalk all of this up as the normal evolution of a relationship. It was inevitable that as the giddy newness faded, we would settle into comfortable patterns. Except that the whole time he was bowling me over, he was keeping his options open with a couple women from his past. Communication lines he swore he severed the day we met, remained, in fact, wide open. This discovery has colored every happy memory of our early days, to the point that I don't trust anything that happened during that time.

And that's a shame, because my journals were so damn happy...

The Wife Who Knows