The Ones that I Loved

I can give you three people, three people that I would say I loved. I mean in the romantic sense. A gregarious person like me loves a whole lot of people, but only these three persons have I loved in that ball crushing way. Thinking of them always makes me anxious, as it did before I had ever met them.
In my early, zit-picking, not-knowing-what-I-am touching life I had that crushing, Smiths-type feeling like I was being weighed down by something and that only love would be able to get that weight off me. However, I was desperately afraid that love would not actually do that. I preferred (and perhaps I still prefer) my fantasies of love than the real thing. Gym Class Heroes would definitely say that I was afraid of being caught in "Cupid's Chokehold". I was an independent person and wanted to remain that way, so I developed this platonic process of dealing with people so that all my teen years I never thought of anyone sexually.
When I read that Scripture passage from the Sermon on the Mount, “If you should look at a woman with lust, you are already committing adultery,” I decided not to fantasise about people at all. Naive, you might think? Well, it worked. In my sexual fantasies, set up scenarios in which I would seduce, philander with, and penetrate fictional characters. This got around my vice-like sense of guilt because I felt that I was not treating any real human being with lust, as they were not real people. This technique allowed me to get close to people in a very different way from most people. I was never interested in sex with actual people. Therefore the first person I loved was in my life during this phase, and our relationship was strange.
She was not someone I allowed much sexual feelings to develop for until I went to university and realised how unhealthy my attitude to sex was. I will call her Dorothea. I call her Dorothea because she reminds me of the character from Middlemarch, being Mr. Fantastically intelligent, Little Flowerishly religious, and Shehulk-like in emotional strength (as an aside she lent me the George Elliot classic, and I lost it on a ship to another island for a family holiday. That pissed her off). The problem about Dorothea and me was that we came from different religion backgrounds, and where I came from this mattered very much. Not only was I very religious, but her father was a missionary whose main goal in life was to convert people away from my religion. She and I used to have theological arguments and because her arguments were so heartfelt and well-thought out it made me much hotter for her. And that mischievous twinkle in her eye told me she felt the same way. The relationship was romantic in that Elizabeth Bennett-Mr. Darcy way. Despite my methods, I found myself relating everything to her. When I saw a new movie, or discovered a painting, or heard a song, it was to her I wanted to speak to and show them to and allow her to experience them with me, to share them with her. Whenever I sinned, I thought of her; I always felt like I needed to apologise to her, that whenever I wronged God, I wronged her. She was the Madonna; she never really became the whore. The situation remained this way all through my high school years, and though I made out with other girls in my drunker moments, she never went out with anybody. I started drinking when I was sixteen, and it felt like that was something we couldn’t share. I hated coming in on Monday mornings, as the rumours of my drunken escapades over the weekend saturated the high school halways, and I would see her staring at me with disgust and disappointment. I can only imagine how much that hurt her.
Our relationship never developed past the intellectual and spiritual. She was never my girlfriend, but she was the most important woman in my life. She was way too important. I was so afraid of her, of not being good enough for me. She seemed equally afraid of me; why this was so I never knew.
We both went abroad for university. We decided to write to each other, not emails but actual letters. We both found it romantic even though our relationship was not supposed to be romantic. I wrote to her about my new friends and my spiritual disconnect from them. She wrote about her loneliness and about how she was jealous of my ability to make friends. We both spoke about everything in relationship to God.
Before entering the seminary, I was asked to get references from my friends. No one new my spiritual life like her, so I asked her. She said she would write it, but when she received the forms, she could not write them, saying she did not believe that priesthood was the life God wanted from me, and that I would make someone a good husband and father. When I entered the seminary, after much prayer, I told her that I would like to marry her if I were to leave the priesthood. She agreed she would have liked to marry me to, if things were different. She said her mother used to say how I would make a good husband for her, if only I was not Catholic.
A few months after taking my religious vows, she told me she was getting married. It was arranged by her parents as was the custom in her indigenous culture. She did not love him, but he was intelligent, religious and very strong. He was a perfect match. They married last month, and she sent me the pictures. She looked extremely beautiful in her snow white dress (she was certainly a virgin). What pleased me more was that she and her husband did not seem to fit together. He was not as good looking as she was, certainly not as good looking as I am. In those pictures, her smile seemed force, the laughter fake, the eyes without sparkle. Still, there was emotion on her face, and it was determination. She would make her marriage work, and she would live a good life, and she would love her husband. But, I kept thinking, sadly, he would never be me.