Previous | Orphan Survival Stories Index | Next

IMPORTANCE I almost hate it when someone asks me if I'm in love. Of course, since I am a married man, I would automatically say that I was in love. What does love feel like to someone who has been severally abused as a child? What does love feel like to someone, now an adult, who has never known what it felt like to be held, hugged or cared about as a child? Does love just happen automatically for people like me? If so, what part of the brain would that feeling come from? I have been in hundreds of short-term relationships over the past 50 years and have been married six times. If I did not know myself better, I would think we have a real nut case on our hands. What we actually have here is a man who has had to guess at what the feeling of love honestly feels like. That feeling did not come to him automatically, as it would to most other people - those who were subjected to the feeling of love through years of having family, friends and love ones. Well, I say that love did not come to him automatically. That is not entirely true. Love did appear to him automatically, but it appears in a different form. It appeared through his sexuality. Now this strange, new and wonderful feeling comes upon him. But he has no idea what to do with it. So that feeling becomes molded by whatever moral or immoral issues society has going on at that time in his life. As the years past and relationships fell to the wayside one after the other, he is now totally confused and can not understand what it is that he has been doing wrong. He was always a hard worker, never drank or used drugs, and always tried to be kind and help others. But all of those things never worked for more than a short period of time. Fifty years later, he finds himself sitting in a dark room feeling alone and trying to fit the pieces of his life together, so that something appears to make sense. Looking and searching in the dark corners of his mind for one little reason to feel that his life had some purpose. Most of the sadness in his life has been of his own doing and he did not even know it. Caused by the decisions that he himself made by always trying to mold himself into what he thought other people wanted him to be. He never stopped playing the game long enough to find out who he really was. He never took the time to find himself, so he could display that wonderful person to the rest of the world, allowing someone to fall in love with ‘that person.’ He constantly changed and molded himself on a daily basis for the good and betterment of the person he was with at the time - always looking out for them, their feelings and their needs. Always feeling that ‘somebody bad’ is better than ‘nobody at all’ and that was all he was worth anyway. He has been a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber and a teacher. He has been a little bit of everything over the past 50 years. He has tried so hard to impress the world so that someone would like and possibly love him, but he never got around to becoming the very most important thing of all. JUST BEING HIMSELF Maybe that is why the world had to wait so long to love him.