Romantic Success

Valentine’s Day 2025

The key to romantic success, the one that unlocked the door to true love for me — came quite by surprise, perhaps by accident.

Or, maybe, it didn’t, if you believe in kismet, and I do.

I harbor no complaints or regrets about the love that did, or didn’t, arrive at my heart’s door before I met my true love.  Each man, boy, and boy/man had taught me something about being kept in the dark about many things, mostly about who he really was.

It’s a singular sadness when a person hides himself from anyone, but it’s particularly sorrowful when the individual constructs elaborate ruses to conceal who he is from a presumed paramour.  After a while, it’s entirely possible that even he doesn’t know who he is anymore.

In those scenarios, I was always dealing with the defense mechanisms of the supposed swain who turned out to be a real pain.  I’d wanted to know this person for who he was, and, since I was game enough to be the real me to him, the love-transaction felt, and was, very uneven, and very unevenly weighted.  The person needing to be “in control” didn’t really have the upper hand, although he thought he did.

The reality of love is that he who feels the need to control another person cannot, at the same time, love that person.  It’s one or the other.  Manipulation and true love do not co-exist.

I easily confess to having perpetrated my share of survival skills during my adolescent and early adult years.  Manipulation was not among those skills; cutthroat reactions to feeling manipulated, betrayed, and snookered were.

I was too bottom-line and efficient in my emotional transactions to bother with the time-consuming tactics of trying to pull someone’s strings.  My personal patented relationship-technique was to lay it on the line, and then, with disappointment, watch the frightened rabbits run away from me.  I didn’t go chasing after them.

I therefore became inured to the reality that the freedom to love, and be loved, had not yet arrived in my life.  I therefore focused on other things, such as developing my abilities, talents, and skills.  I didn’t give love short-shrift, ignore it, or disdain it.  Much to the contrary, I devised my own ideal of it, and tenaciously held out for the big one, True Love.  Because, by the age of twenty-five, I’d become a rather furious female.

I wasn’t furious in the sense of wanting to do harm to any man; I was furious in my drive to love, to live, and to not be blocked in my pathway toward fulfilling those goals.

I’d encountered one too many a boy, living inside the body of a man, whose sole purpose in engaging the opposite sex was to wall off major portions of himself.  My consistent, perhaps only, response to those roadblocks to intimacy was rebellion against anyone who dared to defy the sublime need of the human heart to love. Rebel-me was out to protect my heart through what I came to call Justice of the Heart. There were no plea-bargains in my court of love!

From that point on, I was on my way to where I am today.

So much of my life has turned upon not merely who I encountered along that way, but when.  Had I met my true love merely one or two years earlier than I did, I would not have needed him for the purpose of a long and lasting love.  I would have made use of him — which is not the same as using a person — to help me heal the inner wounds inflicted by others upon me, and I would have gone on my way.

The fact that I met Mr. Milligan when my heart was ready to love, that ripe situation did not sit well with me.  Nope, it did not sit well with me at all!

I’d planned out a very secure course in life as a single woman, working as a professional technical writer for engineers and geologists.  At some point in time, I figured I’d get around to writing The Great American Novel, but first I needed to nail down the independent, self-sufficient objective along that path to success.  And I was 90% there!

I had yet to learn that success is nothing without someone you love to share it with.

I was not a very willing student to those lessons in love and in life.  My very blunt and immediate statement to this newly found boyfriend from Nevada City in the Sierra Nevada foothills was:

“You are really messing things up for me.”

Yes, that summation was my take on taking true love into my war-torn heart!

And in his own confident, quiet way, Mr. Milligan was quite effectively performing precisely that job!  He was running circles around me, and enjoying it!

To this day, this Valentine’s Day, and every Valentine’s Day, I am eternally grateful for the unexpected,l’attendu, that completely put the kibosh on my self-limiting, safe, perpetually routine plans on the drawing board of my life.

I had quite a few things to learn about that drawing board, and millions more lessons to learn about true love!