“How many real adult times have you been in love?”

From Diverting Devotion, a wonderful play by my cousin Mike O’Malley

NANCY. My turn. How many times have you been in love?

HENRY. Real times?

NANCY. You’ve faked being in love?

HENRY. No, but “real” can be a very murky thing for people when it comes to love. There’s high school love, which, when people are going through it, they think it’s real, but then you look back and all it is, is just … puberty juice. Then you got your basic college-love illusion, where feelings are blown way out of proportion by the fact that you can have sex somewhere other than a car.

NANCY. Some people experience real love at that age.

HENRY. At that age people are in love with the idea that they’re in love. They like how it makes them feel grown up. Then they’re crumbled when it ends because they realize it wasn’t a real adult love. (Beat) I’m gonna say that real adult love happens when two people who have been completely devastated by either of these delusions try to make a go of something new. When two formerly heartbroken folks make a choice to pursue new feelings for new people armed with the knowledge of how much it could waste them. That’s love. Knowing the risk. Knowing it could blow up and wreck you. But still diving in.

NANCY. Henry, you’re avoiding the answer.

HENRY. What?

NANCY. How many real adult times have you been in love?

HENRY. Oh. Zero.

NANCY. That’s depressing. Drink.

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18 Responses to “How many real adult times have you been in love?”

  1. melissa says:

    puberty juice… what a perfect phrase! (working with high-schoolers right now… there’s so MUCH puberty juice in the air!)

  2. red says:

    Melissa – hahaha I love that line too.

    It feels so REAL but when you look back on it, you’re like: Huh. That was mostly puberty juice.

  3. MrG says:

    I love that. I think in a real way.

  4. N. says:

    I beg to differ. I was in love in my highschool years, and looking back, there’s still a hole left from that experience. It was absolutley, devistatingly, amazingly love. You can fall in love at any age. It just doesn’t happen very often with younger people because most of them don’t have the emotional maturity to know what real love is.

  5. Helen says:

    2005 I had just turned 62 and I met on the net and the love of my life.This was the person I was waiting for all my life.I would have laid down my life for him.We were so in tune with each other we finished each others sentences and often when chatting online or writing online would say the same thing at the same time.A commitment was made.His female friend who he had told me about but he also said she only wanted to be friends came up to him in a club we were at and draped herself over him whispering in his ear.6 weeks later it was over.I am still in love with him 3 years down the track.

  6. I wrote this six months before I met my wife, which I was 28 when I met her. In it I refer to high school love and my college love that I almost married. It’s a bit much to share in a comment, but this post was so right on with what I felt, that I feel like it’s a good thing to share:

    “I find myself at an interesting point in my life. I am self aware enough to know that where I’m at right now is my true loss of innocence. The world I saw through the eyes of my younger self has all but disappeared. Standing in place of the brilliant, beautiful, living earth that once filled me with joy is a dirtier real world.

    I grew up in a Penacostal Christian home. I have always been driven by the motivation to be a good person, which originally stemmed from wanting to go to heaven. I wanted to be greeted at the pearly gates by God saying, “Well done my child.”

    But, I haven’t believed in God for almost 15 years now. It’s not that I don’t think he’s out there, I just don’t think he is who I thought he was. Without the drive to meet my maker as a faithful servant, I needed a new reason to be alive.

    I debated philosophy in high school and I was wrestling with some pretty significant concepts. I remember laying in my room wondering what was the point of life. I recall thinking that all we humans do is move a bunch of shit around. We move our bodies. We move our furniture. We pick up food, eat it, and then leave it somewhere else. We build buildings and roads to help us move and store stuff. I was at a loss for the motivation behind it all. I decided that I would stay alive because there were old people that were happy, so life must be worth living. Then I had my moment. I was playing my drums to music in my headphones and on this particular day I was in the zone. No matter what song came on I could hear the beat and play it smoothly. I got so excited that I ended up screaming. It hit me right at that moment, that it doesn’t matter why I’m alive, I just knew I wanted more of that feeling. I had found my inspiration.

    It’s been more than a decade since then, and now I realize that I’ve lost what I had once found. If I’m honest, my heart was broken. It was broken when my brother died. It was broken when I left Ohio. It was broken by a woman I planned to love forever. It was broken when my business partner left. It was broken by people that had no idea what they were doing.

    And, now it lays in pieces.

    I don’t get butterflys in my stomach anymore from talking to women. I don’t remember people’s birthdays. I’m not careful with other people’s feelings. I don’t even know what inspires me anymore.

    However, I’m not going to let my heart just lay there in a damaged, fragmented pile–a ghost of what it once was. I’m not going let the problems of the world shatter it any further. That’s not what I was put on this earth for. I know that I am here to be a man, a father, and a husband. Not just for my family, but for those who need love. I don’t know what the fuck I’ve been doing for the past couple of years–letting go of what I know was right.

    I’ve had my fun. I’ve lost my innocence. I’ve been touched by the grime that is so pervasive today. And, I’m glad it all happened the way it did. I wouldn’t change a thing. Because I feel like it is the early morning hours of a new day and the sun is starting to shed light on the earth again. This time I don’t see it through the eyes of a child, but instead through the eyes of a man. And, not just any man, but a man with a new heart. One that’s ready to feel again. One that is ready to extend a hand to those whose hearts are broken.

    I am hungry for feeling joy again. And I know that the only way to be open to joy is to be open to all things. This life is a gift and I’m not going to squander it because my heart was broken. I’m not going to beat myself up that it happened, because I was just child and I didn’t know any better. This time I go forward not with ignorance, but with courage. The courage to be vulnerable and exposed knowing full well that any one person could stab my heart again. But this time, I’m ready. My heart is strong. And, if I should have the good fortune of being surrounded by people that want to nurture my heart, then I shall have no fear.”

  7. annon says:

    i’m in love…………..it hurts. :{

  8. Cousin Mike says:

    I love when characters in fiction or drama say things and then we in real life either concur with them or dispute their statements. I think that Henry in the scene may not be entirely coming clean with his own romantic history. If the Ghost of Christmas Past were to take Henry back in time and show him the depth of his feeling for the women he was with in high school or college I don’t think that Henry would deny the depth of his FEELING. Or that what he felt and called love was in some way a cheap version of love. But I think the love you feel for someone the first time is so powerful because you have no idea that it could FAIL. You are so in deep with the discovery and the vibrancy that you leap with your entire being outstretched–knowing it will be embraced. And you live in that giddy world and you breathe the giddy air, and the intertwining of minds and bodies is so amazing because it is new and reciprocated and the thing that makes us populate the world. Until it is rejected. Or denied. Or, you’re on the hammering end and you end it.

    What Henry is saying is that someone who ends up on the other end of a devastating breakup, someone on the other end of realizing that love sometimes only conquers some things and rarely all–the person who has that experience of heartbreak woven into them and then decides to take another stab at it–or multiple stabs at it–is someone who has made the choice-an adult choice to RISK. Love at a young age does not offer up the same risk because until you have been broken by love you do not know what risk is–or how pain can end up defining you.

  9. red says:

    Straight from the author’s mouth.

    Your words, Mike, are really why that section called itself out to me – I think it’s very eloquent about love at a certain time of life, when you’ve been a little bit wrecked. (shades of Tess of the Durbervilles, perhaps??)

  10. red says:

    Hey – to everyone here – thanks for sharing your stories.

    I deleted name-calling comments. That doesn’t fly on my site.

  11. Candie says:

    I think also there is more than this to it. Love is work and I think it comes down to how hard one is willing to work also. Not talking in anyway about having been cheated on as to some of us some things are unforgivable however I am talking about the Pain that comes from growing in different directions and the work it can take to either catch up with or wait on your partner. This is where most divorce and so on comes in because when people make a commitment now days, it is good as long as things are easy and flowing but the moment it becomes work and the road is rocky not smooth well then the commitment is questioned as is the love. In my eyes, this is the difference between real love and other love. Real love is willing to work and work and work till it works. Forever means forever! When you are really in love you never give up. Just my to cents…

  12. Hivemind says:

    I think many people are ruined by the fairytale of ‘true love’ searching for something perfect that simply does not exist.

  13. Mitch Berg says:

    I think the phrase “Soul Mate” has done more damage to the idea of “love” than any other single concept ever.

  14. I’ve been in love a few times… Utterly delicious experience!

  15. nah says:

    really striking piece. i don’t usually comment, but i am here because of how this hit me in a time where i’m in flux with my love of a few years and secretly hoping they end… without me putting an end to them. :( my partner’s too wonderful to be broken. and i agree, soul mates is rubbish. and i believe you stay with someone until you shouldn’t stay together, and that might look like a “rocky road” when in actuality it’s two people whose paths have diverged for no bad reason. more lessons to be learned and different kinds of connections on an intimate level to be had from other dear people. why trap yourself?… and yet i stay where i am. cuz i love him too much to hurt “us.”

  16. lucy says:

    Cousin Mike’s reflection on the play is so thoughtful and accurate in my opinion. It’s sad that first we have to be broken to learn how to not break each other. But real love is so strong, its tensile strength pulls hearts through dark times into the light.

  17. lucy says:

    Cousin Mike’s reflection on the play is so thoughtful and accurate in my opinion. It’s sad that first we have to be broken to learn how to not break each other. But real love is so strong, its tensile strength pulls hearts through dark times into the light.

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