The Language of Heartbreak

March 10, 2018 ~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I have been taking refuge in reading and writing. Sometimes I come to type my thoughts here. I also keep a daily counter of the days spent without my love addiction. The need and the craving are all still there, but at least I am keeping to my intention, no seeing him, if I can help it.

The trouble comes when I remember him. An image passes before my mind’s eye, or I cave in and let my eyes roam over his public Facebook photos. I read or hear something and it reminds me of something he said. I see his name somewhere, a curse because his first name is quite a common one, and I feel the stab between my ribs or the fingers of pain and regret squeezing my throat. It happens daily and I just need to breathe and let it pass, just like withdrawal symptoms of drugs or alcohol. It is quite painful to let go, and it will take a long time. For a recovering alcoholic even a single drink risks a return to addiction, so I might also be in for a lifelong battle.

My reading journeys are taking me into other people’s stories and lives, some real and some imagined. I have discovered a new empathy for the dysfunctional and heartbroken. Now it seems that there is a new language I understand, that of heartbreak, and I find myself quite touched by the stories of love and loss, especially love of the variety I found with Aquarius II. I am painfully aware of what I have lost, and I can empathize and recognize when one of my fictional characters is about to experience the same loss, whether they themselves realize it or not.

I have spoken before about my reaction to The English Patient. Aquarius II told me he loved the book and read it more than once. I loved it too, and this is perhaps a testimony to our twin emotional disposition. But even before I experienced my wild attachment to Aquarius, part of me hungered for a deep love connection. I was still married to my emotionally distant husband when I saw the movie Bridges of Madison County for the first time. I watched it on late night television, while my husband slept in our room. I should add here that this did not happen often, because he rarely allowed any light, television or any other noise or activity after his chosen time for lights out. Fortunately, the movie was gentle and quiet, so I was able to finish it without disturbing the sleeping husband. When it ended, I quietly wept, knowing that I also craved these feelings, a love that transcends its temporal limitations and lives in the heart long after the lovers part. I might have eventually got my wish. Pity though that my love affair was completely devoid of love scenes.

The latest book that hooked me with its raw emotion is a collection of short stories entitled A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. I usually find story collections hard to get into but these stories read like scattered experiences from the author’s life. After reading some, one begins to recognize the author in her many guises, her dysfunctional family, her lovers, and her wild and free life. Her creativity is electric, fueled by a free spirit and substance abuse. I admired her courage in raising four sons, while working odd jobs (including as a cleaning woman, ER nurse, receptionist, and teacher) and battling alcoholism. I was also emotionally bowled over by her experience of love. The fleeting love affairs she had with a Mexican diving instructor, the love of an older student in her university days, or the affair she had with a much younger man. All this, in addition to the men she married. Those lovers were not perfect, there were one or two losers and at least one addict, and all were broken and imperfect. Nevertheless the love itself is perfect in its time and place, in the way two people connect and become more than the sum of their individual selves. I am slightly envious of her emotional experience, and her abiding faith in the power of love. She describes the singular power of love even in the face of death. Her sister is experiencing and enjoying love even while having chemotherapy sessions for her terminal cancer. In almost all her stories, however, the hopefulness of love is intertwined with desperation. Lovers sometimes abuse, betray or abandon. And love does not survive poverty and abuse. The stories are sometimes strange and funny but they mostly left their emotional imprint. They spoke to me in the language of heartbreak.

This Online Dating Thing

March 9, 2018March 12, 2018 ~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

A month or so before I decided to stop my emotional affair, I downloaded and paid a subscription for some online dating platforms. It was a distraction I thought. Now, whenever I am terribly heart-sore and missing him I get to swipe NO on the good, the bad, the ugly, the sexually deprived, the searcher for sugar mommy, the wanna-be mysterious (no photo no details only initials), and the gross (photo of a badly beaten up face – I have seen this yes). I have also learned to swipe left on people with selfies of bare torsos, lying down in bed, and selfies in mirrors or with huge glasses. In addition to all these, I systematically reject anyone wearing a pilot uniform. I reason that these are usually looking for a stop-over hookup. I am not into that sort of thing, although sometimes I wish I were. It is as uncomplicated as it gets. You sleep with the pilot, who is probably married and has done this sort of thing countless times, he flies away, you never see him again. Good riddance.

Occasionally I swipe right on somebody who looks half-decent or somebody who is mysterious but interesting. But even then there are the people who put you off from the word go. Someone once started his messages to me “Hi Beb”. I never responded. See I have this thing about good grammar and spelling. Moreover, sweet-talk and flattery puts me off instantly. Another guy started saying: You are so beautiful. He never heard from me either. I know I am above average in looks but I dislike it when men lay it on too thick. I still entertain the distant hope that someone would be more interested in my mind than in my body. I found this in my hopeless love connection, and it moved me deeply. I now know that a profound emotional and intellectual connection is the only type of love that will work for me.

Most guys on those dating platforms are liars. Once I engage them in lengthy conversations they sometimes get caught in their web of lies and stop talking to me, also good riddance. Other worrisome types are those who come across as too needy, excessively romantic, and want to find a soul-mate immediately. These people bore me quickly and I find their sentiments insincere at worst or irrational at best. If you are a hopelessly romantic type, please consider that it took me 30 years of my adult life to be truly moved by love, and you think that you have found it after chatting with me for two minutes? There is no good way to tell you this: You are delusional, and we have very little in common.

I have been online for almost two month now. I met two people who could become good friends for a coffee and chat. I will never find love with them. Not the love that will make me forget my heartache. When I look at these people I chat with, a stifling sense of futility comes over me. I have chatted up this anonymous person whose handle is Aquarius and whom I found a bit interesting and witty. We banter back and forth, and I do not know who he is. He wrote for a living he said. And I caught myself wishing that he was my Aquarius trying to reach out to me again anonymously after I turned away from him publicly. I examine this secret (and futile) hope in my heart, and it saddens me. I think the online dating thing is part of my sickness, and definitely not the cure.

The Emotional Affair : It IS a thing

March 4, 2018March 4, 2018 ~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

Grief has been the hardest things to wrestle with in my strange emotional connection. I do not think I have experienced so much heartache in decades. Not even my divorce was so full of sorrow and helplessness. I know that I was gutted when my first boyfriend decided to marry his childhood sweetheart and long-time fiancee. But even then I found the strength to quit my home country and turn my attention to other projects.

My past relationships have played themselves out somehow, and have been completed so I managed eventually to deal with my grief. I now realize that I probably fortified myself with the shields of anger (in the case of my divorce) and guilt (in the case of my first boyfriend). Strangely those emotions were helpful in the short-term outcome for my sadness. Some counterpoint to concentrate upon other than the sadness and sorrow. Here on the other hand, the overwhelming emotion is plain unfiltered grief.

This weekend was particularly hard on me as I pondered again what I largely consider an unresolved relationship. It was never a love-and-leave situation, not in the traditional sense. We shared coffee and an intense emotional connection, that was it. I could not understand why giving this up was harder and more excruciatingly painful to me than the breakdown of my marriage or leaving the first man I loved. I did not understand my endless weeping over a love that lived only in my mind. Fortunately there are writings about this online and elsewhere, and it appears that physical relationships are sometimes easier to process and get over than pure emotional ones. You see an emotional affair is a thing, and it takes courage and a lot of pain to get over it. The emotional affair has all the hallmarks of addiction. Its unresolved physical aspect makes it live on in the heart and mind, fed by imagination and fantasy, and the constant sad refrain of “What if?”. It is also a form of betrayal to the spouse. As I read on a website: What would hurt a spouse more, what their cheating partner does with his genitals or what he does with his heart?

Although I was the unattached party, I felt instinctively from the start that there was something not quite right in the connection. He, who should be the older and the wiser, was the first to venture into the murky water of emotions. He flirted shamelessly, made sexual innuendos, and even once or twice made subtle hints to emotional estrangement from his wife. It is true that he always spoke in praise of her endless understanding and patience, yet there were those subtle references to incompatibility, lack of conversation and his long ventures on activities that exclude her. When quizzed about it one day he denied making such hints, saying he is “usually very careful”. This leads me to suspect that he has tread these murky waters of emotional affairs before. Yes, I have seen all these danger signs yet my connection to him was so strong and intoxicating that I ignored them and went along. I never started our endless text conversations, and I would have never ventured into this territory if he did not lead me there. My aversion to this did not come from prior knowledge it was just sound instinct.

The sad thing about these connections is that once the line of friendship is crossed, there is no going back to it. I tried once to reset the content of our conversation. I told him that he should always imagine his wife at the table with us, but we kept slipping back to the forbidden territory. In the end I could not take it. The meetings kept building me up emotionally to anticipate a conclusion that never came, like a piece of music that keeps gathering up in sound while the ear eagerly awaits its final movement, then abruptly ends leaving the audience in confusion. Finally, I decided to bring my own conclusion to the piece. I have always known that this will end some day. The only question was not if, but when, and whether we end it before or after physical consummation.

I must admit here that I wanted to have him to myself for once. To steal or borrow him briefly from his life as I always told him. I was only stopped by the impracticality and difficulty of the task. Because for me, it has to be planned, somewhere out of town, not my place, nor his. Not in car, or in any place that will make the experience feel rushed and cheap. Ironically, my conservative nature came to my rescue and I made the sin so difficult to accomplish that it became easier to abandon the thought altogether. Can you imagine me waiting with baited breath for all the time it will take for all these conditions to be fulfilled? I think hell would freeze over first.

The easier way turned out to be like this: Send a short message on his birthday, one that wished him light in his life and lightness on his shoulder in the next decades (it was a decade birthday for him). The same day I claimed that I already had lunch when he suggested we meet for lunch. He then sent me a message that he was off for a few days. See you next week he said. I responded: OK. enjoy. That was it. I thought that I would need to reject more lunch invitations but I think he understood the inevitability of my position. It has been a few weeks since that day, and I caved in only once. I texted him a book recommendation over one weekend. He knew that I was saddened by our affair and asked how I was. I responded that I am getting there although still sad. I have fought the urge to text him a hundred times since that day and I am sure I will continue to do so. I do not think he will text me again.

I have no doubt that what I felt for the man was real. I loved him truly and completely. For him, maybe it was an emotional affair, or a planned physical affair that went wrong. I do believe that there were genuine feelings from his side too. He was however wrong by assuming that the affair did not involve cheating, because he (we?) did cheat. I never met his wife and now I am glad I did not. I feel a bit guilty towards her even now, and if we had ever met I have a feeling that she would have known how I felt about her husband.

I am hoping that this will be my final reckoning with this unplanned and unfulfilled love affair. I forgive the man, even though he was unfair to me by pulling me into his orbit, with words he does not mean. And I forgive him for looking at me with eyes that meant what he did not say. I forgive myself for falling for him and responding to his intensity with an intensity of my own. I will work through completing my grief process at losing him and hopefully one day I will meet him quite by chance and feel nothing. For now I will continue to avoid him. Fortunately we do not move in the same constellations, and we do not work in the same place. It will always remain a mystery to me why I fell for him, it was perhaps my perception, and my intuition of his feelings. He taught me how intense love could be. One day I will be able to take a chance on love again.

My failure this time was not my misinterpretation of the danger signs. I saw them very clearly earlier on. I just misjudged my capacity for love, and overestimated my immunity to its pain.

To Be Disassembled

March 2, 2018March 2, 2018 ~ marobbie ~ 1 Comment

Is there a logic to sadness? How and why it gets hold of your throat and strangles you on a cool and grey morning or in the middle of a sunny afternoon? Is there a cure for missing someone in places that were never shared? How do you forget moments of intensity, that cut straight through the heart?

The rain will always remind me of you. Me and you sheltering under the umbrella of a picnic table, you averting your eyes and choking slightly as I silently wept. I still cry at the memory. We never said goodbye, not in words, but my tears have always known that I have to let you go. On that rainy day, I remember we shared little sweet tomatoes, and I promised to get you a package next week, when you returned from mission, sometime in the future. I never got to do it. Yesterday, I asked for two packages, and I am already choked up and saddened because I won’t be sharing them with you. I think I will have to let go of the sweet baby tomatoes too.

I have abandoned our usual lunchtime, went back to eating at noon. I eat chicken and meat again at lunch to spite your vegetarian gods. I never have coffee at the usual place, nor the usual time. I am going quickly through all the books you told me you liked, as if I am putting everything on a funeral pyre, to burn. I am incinerating pieces of my heart in the process.

If I had read the English Patient before I met you, I would have classified it as pretentious literary drivel. Who on earth would write a sentence like “penis like a sleeping seahorse” ?. I still hate that sentence, but I mostly get the book. I relate to the raw pain of the broken characters that populated the story. I also ask myself half a dozen times a day “How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled”. In your absence you are no less present in my heart, like one of Kip’s sleeping bombs waiting to explode. I wish I had the talent to defuse your memory. So that I can stop the sudden explosion of sadness, the choking hold that grabs my throat at odd times. Most days I am fine, I can enjoy the sunshine, coffee, food, and my son’s company. But I do not have patience with new people. I prefer to be alone. At times I take a forest path, I sit at the water watching a pair of crowned crane flanked by a school of Ibis. I am outwardly calm and content but I never know when I will be hit by that overwhelming tide of sadness. Like today.

I let go completely on the hope that each new day will be a little easier. That my heart will heal eventually. But the road is long, especially knowing what I found and what I was honor-bound to give up. I was disassembled by loving you, and I fear that I will always be broken, and never feel whole again, without you.

Love in the Present Tense

December 11, 2017March 2, 2018 ~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I saw an old photo of you. You looked heartbreakingly young and silly. The woman you are with, who ended up as your wife, looked very attractive and so much more stylish and mature than you were.

If I had met you at that age, I would have dismissed you as too goofy and immature. I don’t think I would have fallen for you. It is true that as a young man you were very good-looking, with a full head of blond hair and a brighter version of those piercing blue eyes that I can drown into. I still love you better with your sun spots and wrinkles; they speak of your journey, how you loved, and lost, and loved again. How you were reformed as a husband and father, and how in some ways you never managed to grow up from the goofy young man you were in that photo, while in others you became too weary and old.

I love you despite all your faults, and maybe because of them. I love you even knowing that I never want to trade places with the woman who shares your life, a woman who I feel has given up too much of herself and her independence to keep you going. I love you because your eyes sometimes light up for me and tell me things that I like to hear, perhaps things that you are not capable of saying, or things that I have only imagined. I love you even though you said to me that you wish you met me when I was younger, slimmer, and without grey hair. This was your comment on a photo of me 20 years ago, before I met the man who was to father my only child and then move on to become my ex husband. I did not fully understand then why the comment hurt me. I just told you that the girl in the photo does not exist anymore.

I always envied couples who have preserved their love, or partnership over many years. Those who have grown older together from being a young couple or school sweethearts. It saddens me even now that I will never have this experience. But I would settle for someone who loved me better as a mature woman, than he would have the ignorant girl. I would settle for someone who would prefer me as a mother, as someone who had lost and suffered and bounced back again. I would perhaps even willingly fall for someone who would love me with my wrinkles and white hair, the way I love you. It would have been nice if I had this experience for once, and met someone who loved the real me better than the old image. Because I am a better person now than I was 20 years ago.

The chances of this happening are very slim, and it is highly unlikely that I would meet a man who would bother to look a little bit beyond the surface. This makes me sometimes sad, and sometimes a bit resentful and jealous of a person like you who can enjoy the quiet devotion of a long-time partner and the crazy infatuation of a younger woman who openly tells you she prefers the current balder, grayer and older version to the younger image. You are so lucky to have love in all possible tenses, while it is a struggle for me to find it even in the present tense.

It’s a Cold and It’s a Broken Hallelujah

November 24, 2017November 28, 2017 ~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I love most of Leonard Cohen’s songs, but I recently discovered the tabs for his very famous song Hallelujah. It is one song I could play and comfortably sing along on my ukulele. My voice has a very small range, and it is lower in tone than most female voices, so it is easier to follow on Cohen’s bass rendition.

I admit that I choked a few times while singing it, because now I completely relate that love is not a victory march, not someone who saw the light, it is a cold and broken Hallelujah. My voice sometimes also breaks with the pain of it.

It has proven very difficult so far to bend my crazy heart to reason. The emotional turmoil is somewhat bearable when I have the prospect of seeing him every day, when I know that we are waking up to the same sunshine, or rainstorm, when I hope, that perhaps today we will meet, and put on just a little bit of eyeliner and lipstick in enthusiastic anticipation. It could turn out later that he is busy. He might text me saying that he has all-day meetings, or indeed ask me to join him for coffee. Whatever the outcome, I just live in anticipation of a coffee chat, a text, or a chance meeting (which has never happened apart from the first two times we ever saw each other). Yet even in his almost constant absence, he is present in my heart, as the last thought I close my eyes to when I turn in to sleep, and he is the first person I think about when I open my eyes to sunshine, or to another bout of insomnia.

It is so much more difficult when he is away. We never speak or interact over weekends either, but I learned to manage that absence, especially since we catch up on Monday or late during the week. But when he leaves town, it is torture. He left a few days ago on a family trip, and he will be away on a working trip right after. The day before his departure we had our usual coffee and laughs. It was fun, until it was time to take my leave and say goodbye. My voice broke over “I will miss you”. I felt as if a giant hand was squeezing my heart and a lump formed in my throat. I was close to crying especially when he said sotto voce that he will miss me too. For him this is unusual and it brought tears to my eyes as I left him carrying my heavy heart and the lump in my throat. We never embrace and we hardly even touch in greeting. I know my feelings for him are too combustible for such closeness especially at a moment of goodbye. This time his absence will be measured in days, not even weeks, but I cannot help the disproportionate amount of sadness that envelops me. I always feel keenly the pre-programmed loss of our connection. One day he will leave, or I will leave, I am going to lose him forever perhaps sooner rather than later. How will I handle missing him forever when I cannot even take his absence for a few days?

Love is a cold and broken Hallelujah, indeed.

Unexpected Rewards of Love

November 8, 2017November 12, 2017 ~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

As I continue to wrestle with the inconveniences, and the occasional sadness, there are some surprising positive aspects of falling in love.

I have started strumming my ukulele more regularly. Maybe it is a good thing that its bright and happy register does not lend itself well to melancholy, but I occasionally manage a thoughtful chord progression. Most of the time though I can strum a happy tune that conveys the emotional high.

My meetings with Aquarius II are still full of laughter, sometimes induced by our conversations and other times by the happenings around us. A few days ago, we witnessed a close encounter with one of the resident cheeky monkeys, who tried to steal someone’s lunch, but was fortunately frustrated by a combination of sturdy packaging and a quick-thinking bystander. The incident is probably somewhere on video. But even without the monkeys there is never a dull moment at lunchtime. I replay the conversations in my mind and the memory brings back excitement and smiles.

I have a lot more energy. I am a regular customer now at the gym. On dry days I go out for a jog and I am slowly improving on my pace, distance and time. If this continues I might run an ultra-marathon one day.

During my jogging/running sessions I started listening again to Arabic music, the rhythm of slower Arabic songs matches my tortoise pace. And nobody does love and heartache quite like Arabs do, and in my devotion to Aquarius 2, I am wholly and totally Arab. In the tradition of classical lovers of my Arab ancestry, I have done the sleepless nights, the sighs that melt the stone and the rivers of salty tears. The cheesy words I scoffed at most of my life finally make sense. I do worship the ground he walks on, and when he is away my heart flutters painfully like a dove with its wing caught in a trap. I can go on running listening to these painful images now, but once when he was away a particular song touched me so deeply I had to stop at my gate and have a good cry right there. The tears are not necessarily a bad thing, I now know. I have developed a healthier sense of compassion with the pain of others. When the time comes I am sure I can lend a hand (and a big ear) to my son, my girlfriends or anyone I know who experiences heartache.

My feelings have also inspired me to put my thoughts into words again. As you can read, my writing has not improved profoundly with the eruption of passion, but I still write from the heart, and with feeling. And for better or worse there are things I want to commit to memory for later years. I might yet translate some love poems that speak to me or I might try to describe my love as I see him. There are things that I am still shy to write, the erotic images he provokes that bring my inside to melt. Most of the time, however, I think that he does not need to try very hard because even the innocuous image of him walking barefoot in the sand or interacting kindly and lovingly with his child is enough to sear my heart.

And of course there are always, always the things that I yearn to express beyond words and looks. I constantly fight the compulsion to reach out and touch, with my hand, with my fingertip. In my mind I venture further to touch my lips to the crown of his head, his brow or to the fuzz around his lips. I know he likes to be kissed near his ear, and what I would give to do it. I rarely dare to picture a forbidden kiss on the lips, because I still remember one chaste kiss he planted on my forehead as I lay on a hospital bed. On the right side of my forehead it was, the cool touch of his lips burned me then and still does in memory.

I keep thinking that in contrast to all my previous infatuations and love interests, it seem as if my heart has chosen Aquarius II in defiance of my mind. My heart simply responded to what it read in his eyes, real or imagined, and made the leap that my mind was never ready for. I tried to fight it and change it. At times I was angry with myself and other times I was just sad, but at the end I let go and resigned to it. Once I surrendered and accepted the joy and pain of this attachment, I found a surprising source of peace. I have cried less and felt less anger at the universe, my luck and my foolish heart. This peace that comes with letting go and accepting has been another lesson I take from this strange relationship.

Where he is concerned I am neither jealous nor resentful. And while I am usually impulsive and reactive I try to let things happen and go with the flow. There is a certain wisdom that I am gaining from this, as I practice the ability to tame my passion, and bring it down to earth before it soars and burns me. I now appreciate the eastern practice of meditation and breath control.

Here as well I am coming back to the Arab wisdom of traditional proverbs. One that comes to my mind very often these days is a saying from Damascus, not my native Aleppo. People of my native city are stereotyped as passionate and emotional. They wrote the most melting and heartfelt love songs to the music of traditional religious hymns. Damascene people, in contrast, are known as the better negotiators, politicians and mediators. So this particular saying about patience will come more naturally to a cool Damascene than a hot-headed Aleppean: كل شي دواه الصبر إلا قلة الصبر ما لها دوا = Patience is a cure for everything, but impatience has no cure.

Time in the end heals everything, I will give it time.

Going with the Flow

November 5, 2017November 5, 2017 ~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

It has been only four months since I met you and I still cannot explain how you have become so important to me. How my world has shrunk around getting drunk on your eyes and getting high on coffee and our conversations. You would meet me whether rain or shine and we would lose the minutes playing out intimate encounters in our mind after we roughly outline them with words. There is never too much detail, we just imagine the place, and the time, the rest plays out in our heads and I leave you drunk on the imagined pleasure and burning with longing for what is impossible to attain.

I told you once to have a heart that I have spent more than five years in celibacy. In truth though my 66 months of abstinence were never a hardship until now. I never even counted them or felt their weight until this slow-burn of pining for you.

I now live on two competing hopes. My rational mind wishes for this to fizzle and die, that I will move on to something more plausible or go back to my carefree and man-free existence. While my heart and my soul entertain the notion that perhaps this is the real thing, and it will last and deepen. Then, perhaps, in a year, two years, three years, someday I will be able to borrow you once from your life. That for once I will be able to feel, what it is like to love and be loved in return, no past, no future, just the one moment that I will commit to memory instead of living it in imagination. I have a feeling that this hope will sustain me for a long time.

I have never felt anything so deeply, and although I keep second-guessing my mental health and sanity at least twice a day. My heart and my intuition tell me that I will belong to you for a long time, even if I will never own you myself.

And even through this roller-coaster of emotions that are unsettling my mind, body and soul. There is an element of peace to letting destiny unfold the way it will. I tried to fight my strong feelings for you before, I tried to cut you off and break off contact with you, and it nearly killed me. I will not fight my emotions anymore. At the same time I will not try to initiate a situation where we take this relationship to a level we will both feel guilty about, ultimately regret, and then be forced to end. So we defer even our first kiss to 2019. One or both of us telling ourselves that maybe then the universe will tilt the other way, and we will turn into innocent and crazy friends, simple coffee buddies, once we have tamed the fire of our mutual attraction. Maybe if one, or both of us believe this it will turn into our new truth.

In the end things will happen the way the are supposed to. There is no fear in my heart nor worry. I just take the moment and hope you stay in my life, on any terms.

The Various Inconveniences of Falling in Love

October 31, 2017October 31, 2017 ~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

There is apparently a reason why it is called “falling” in love. It unsettles and topples the balance of your life. The ground shifts under your feet and you lose your footing, falling is not meant to be a pleasant sensation. I am experiencing all this and more.

Of course there is always the inconvenient and persistent longing for Aquarius II, which hits at odd times during the day. For example the minute he leaves me with an offhand comment about an imagined intimacy, or when I wake up in the early hours of the morning to the cooling morning breeze, and an inexplicable feeling of missing him, and wanting to wrap myself around him to get some warmth for my limbs, my heart and my soul. My usual methods of dealing with this sudden onset of physical desire do not work. The body might become tired, or sated but the soul remains hungry and unfulfilled.

Another side effect that I have noticed is my flaring temper and my propensity to pick up fights and argument. Where I am usually passive and reluctant to stand up for myself or others, I am now quick to argue and with more passion than is usual for me. My middle eastern heritage is to blame for some of my reactions, I do tend to angry outbursts sometimes, but I think the added testosterone in my system is also a partial culprit for my extreme reactions.

Hormonal changes are nature’s way of ensuring best conditions for pro-creation. Females become more aggressive, and sexually aggressive in particular , while males experience lower levels of testosterone making them less aggressive and more in touch with their feminine sides, and thus closer to their mates. It looks like we human animals are short-wired for these responses, regardless of age.

A lot has also been written about the pleasant side of falling. The rush, and the thrill of it. It is very similar to the effect of drugs, without the fatal side effects. These are also the side effects of the hormone cocktail love exposes us to. My reaction to those was so violent, I suspected that I was going crazy, I still suspect that sometimes. There are also the bursts of creativity, energy and emotion. So in all it is not a bad ride, the inconvenient side effects seem like a small price to pay.