“It Sort of Crept Up on Me”

Dave liked to design postcards, with “vintage” images. Once, though, he used our names instead.

This morning I can’t find the page in Mockingjay, the final volume of the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, where Katniss asks a friend whether he’d loved his girlfriend right away. “No,” he responds, “she crept up on me.”

That’s helpful for Katniss. And today it’s helpful for me, too.

So many romance stories suggest that falling in love happens in a moment. You see someone and they look into your eyes and you “know.”

Well, that was never my story. With both of my early marriages, enthusiastic lovemaking came before any clarity of emotions. Music that was playing “carried me away” into that enthusiasm. Then, applying my mother’s long-ago instruction that love is built and chosen, that when you find the person you want to love, you then make a commitment and build from there, I stepped into those marriages determined to do the grown-up love part.

You know what they say about how clearly you can see when you look backward, yes? I didn’t really know what I wanted from life back then, except for “adventure.” (Didn’t want to copy what looked like the very boring lives that my parents lived.) So how could I have logically chosen someone whose longings would fit with mine? I couldn’t. And both of those relationships ended, one after five years, one after nine.