There is a kind of love that everyone should experience and which I did, except it wasn’t during my marriage.

By nature, it is a love that doesn't carry the responsibility of marriage. It doesn't expect the other person to carry out the garbage or do the grocery shopping. (It doesn't mind cooking, though, because some of us really vibe with cooking.) But it doesn't have to coordinate who's picking up the kids from school. It doesn't have to spend Thanksgiving with extended family if it doesn't want to. It doesn't have to deal with all that diurnal dirty laundry that marriages or long-term live-in committed relationships do. (I have given the bleakest of views on marriage, but it's more for contrast than anything else.)

There is a love we might refer to as a "once in a lifetime" love. Or that the other person is the "love of my life."

It's always experienced in the present: it doesn't have the baggage of history, and it can't plan too far ahead. It can't assume it will be experienced tomorrow. It may be silenced suddenly. And permanently. It has the quality of making one feel incredibly vital--even powerful--though it also makes one feel weak and powerless. We have almost no say in its longevity.

It's a love, for better or worse, by which every other love is measured.

If you've had this particular love, and if it's now part of your past and not present, you will know how timeless and eternal it is--it is like something priceless caught in amber. You can always look at it--captured just as you last remember it--but you can never again touch it. You can't remove it from the amber without making it disintegrate.

Speaking only from my experience, it can't be sought. It must happen on its own. That's the nature of it: this "love" has a quality of independence and separateness. It comes into existence on its own, and both lovers yield to it.

With all the pain that comes from this love being in the past, I nevertheless hope each of you finds it.