Chapter 1; It was a dark and stormy night...

Snoopy sits atop his doghouse typing his novel...

"CHAPTER 1"
"It was a dark and stormy night..."

It's no secret to anyone who knows me that my love life is, well, sketchy. First marriage two weeks after high school graduation, baby, divorce, late 20's second marriage, clinical depression, baby, divorce, and an utterly ill-advised third and possibly last marriage towards the tail-end of the clinical depression that skated me right to the edge of suicidal. Aaaaand divorce.

Dark and stormy all right.

The last two marriages and my depression were "counseled" by a doc who (obviously) was my kind of people - plain talking, no-nonsense, funny, down-to-earth - and when we had our last session he said "Well, I think you're...", and I filled in "Normal?" He laughed and said no, he preferred to use the term healthy. He said he felt healthy was a much more accurate adjective because in his estimation, what passes for "normal" in this day and age is pretty damned scary.

Or dark and stormy.

And this is where the two converge... a long-term relationship with a man I thought I'd be with the rest of my life ended last year and I was left feeling mentally and physically like someone had beaten me with a blunt object...  that I was the only person, probably in the world, maybe the entire universe, who was such a bad judge of domestic partners and going through the failure of another relationship at the ripe old age of 43. That although I was healthy, I was an utter and spectacularly flaming failure at love.

Dark, dark, dark.

I turned to online social networking to alleviate the crushing lonliness and to feel connected.  In short order, I  found hundreds of former high school friends...  jocks, heads, nerds, princesses...  and learned again and again and again that time had indeed been the great equalizer...  that though we'd fallen into cliques and categories in our 'Glory Days', we were now in the same foundered life and relationship boats by (as one friend noted) way of having lived the "same shit storms in life".

Storm, storm, storm.

And oddly, these friends I connected or reconnected with - save a few who forgot to wipe the sprinkling of bitterness from around their lips - seem pretty healthy to me...  searching for that rewarding existance and/or that healthy personal relationship, but all essentially on the same plane in terms of views and beliefs...  healthy...

::WAAAAAHHHHHH:: 
(picture winged, horn-blowing cherubs and parting clouds with rays of sunshine beaming down)

Now.  I know it seems sophomoric but what I finally "got" is that it's not just me.  Much as this universe circles me and only me sometimes, it really ain't just me...  that there are a butt-load of healthy people my age out there who made good decisions about domestic partners and who, whatever the reason, are in the same sad little boat I am.  And they're searching, too.  And, like me, they're hoping that the stats are wrong, that we aren't shit out of luck because we're in our 40's, and that we still have time to mold rewarding existences and/or find healthy, loving, long-lived domestic relationships.

But even if we don't, what I try to hold onto is this... with the multitude of close friends I have, the family I have, the connections and reconnections I've made and now cherish in a way I couldn't "back when", I'm not a failure at love - I love many people very much and they love me back - and I'm damned healthy...  it's mastering the decisions about domestic relationships I suck at and since practice makes perfect (and I've surely had enough of that), and I can be damned tenacious, eventually I believe I'll master that too.

::and the curtain falls::