After brief flings with a Satanist, a priest, and a Croatian mercenary, I dated a man with multiple personalities. He would switch several times during a single date, from a 24-year-old gay man named Ed to an 8-year-old mute girl named Sue to an angry homophobic teenager named Dustin. Towards the end, we were up to 19 personalities, including a Labrador retriever, with names he insisted I learn if I truly loved him. I kept a journal and, after each date, record any recent additions. He left me to take a job with the State Department in Washington.
Next there was Gary. On the way to a party my friends were throwing for us, suddenly, there were flashing lights and a siren. The police stopped his car and took him to jail for outstanding warrants. I had to bail him out so my friends could meet him before dessert.
Then there was the long-term boyfriend, who embezzled money from the clothing store I financed for him and sold cocaine from the dressing rooms to make up the deficit. All our future dates were held in court.
I finally asked my therapist, "Why am I so horrible at dating?"
Peter said, "You don't date. You run a halfway house for wayward boys."
"Well, why do I keep falling in love with that kind of guy?"
He told me I wasn't falling in love. I was falling into danger. It kept me from noticing how terrified I was of intimacy. "You're more comfortable handling neurotics like your mother than regular people who might require that you to be genuine, vulnerable, and imperfect. You know, all those things you hate."
I didn't understand.
"Tell me," Peter asked, "how do you know when you are falling in love?"
"Well, my heart beats fast. I get giddy and disoriented. My palms sweat, and my mouth goes dry."
"That's not love. That's terror," he said.
News to me. "Then what do you think love feels like?"
He thought for a moment. "Love feels like this: You're bone-tired after a long day. You melt onto the couch and put your feet up. And you say, 'Ah, it's so good to be home.'"
"That sounds boring."
"No. It's contentment. You've been calling it the wrong thing."
He said I would always have eyes for the wrong guy. I couldn't help it. My antenna was bent that way. "What you can help is not giving them the keys to your house."
He said the right guy was out there, but to find him, I had to be afraid as I was. To stop pretending that I was invulnerable because I wasn’t.
Before therapy, I would have never noticed my husband Jim in a crowd. Not that he's not good-looking—he is. He's great-looking and very sexy, even after 21 years together. But my radar would not have picked him up because he doesn't need to be fixed, financed, or paroled. He isn't desperate, dangerous, or unavailable. He allows me to be as afraid and as vulnerable as I am.
We can be intimate without me having to be two states over. Jim's a grown-up, the first I ever dated. Peter was right: loving Jim is like coming home.
"Ah-h–h-h-h–h!"
Serial Killers Need Love, too!