I have loved so many people in my life...

In general, I have always been a romantic when it comes to love in the fairy tale sense.  I always thought I was in love from my first boyfriend in Kindergarten, Brandon to my husband Joseph.  As I grow and am able to look back, I realized love, or the people I have loved in my youth in a romantic sense, was a feeling of belonging and understanding I yearned for.  For the longest time I thought that sense of belonging was found in another person.

Some of the other people I loved: Brian,  my 7th grade best guy friend turned boyfriend in the 9th grade.  We are still friends to this day. He lives in Dallas with his beautiful family. Brian is also adopted and 1/4 Korean. He was the 1st person I had met that I ever felt like could truly identify with me.  We had a very special relationship. He’s very smart and funny…a professor at SMU in Dallas. Growing up he was a talented percussionist. I always had a thing for drummers.

Not too soon after Brian and my romantic relationship ended, I started dating Andrew, also a percussionist.  He was a friend at first. It’s funny how we got together. He really liked a friend of mine, Britni . She was new to the school in 9th grade, blonde, petite, sweet and just picture perfect.  I had liked Andrew’s childhood best friend, Brandon for a couple of years, but nothing formal ever transpired. Andrew and I had a great plan to set each other up with our friends, but turns out our friends liked one another and started dating.  So funny, and we were kind of at a loss for how to deal with it, so we finally dated one another. It lasted for 2.5 years. We thought we were in love, but just so young. I was really hard on him and did not appreciate or accept him the way I should have.  I didn’t realize that at the time, nor did I know how to.

My last high school boyfriend was Mark.  He was a year younger than me and just a bit different than anyone I had met.  He was tall, dark and handsome, interested in Frank Sinatra, Rachmaninoff, cooking and seemed cultured in a way and also played football.  But I should have know as he wasn’t a percussionist that it wouldn’t last. We dated for 2-3 years while he finished high school and then went off to college.  I lost my virginity to him. I guess I loved him enough, but looking back our relationship was a bit silly, and he was very full of himself, stubborn and fighting demons that would have been volatile if we stayed together.

I loved a boy named Drew .  He was a couple years older than me…a percussionist, wild, unruly and very handsome in an artistic way.  I think I loved him the most of all my boyfriends, although we were never truly boyfriend and girlfriend. We dated on and off for about 10 years, in the Fall of my senior year 2000, before I committed to Mark, and then on and off until 2010.  We were very compatible, and I just loved being around him and with him. He was the kind of person I could do anything with and it would always be fun. Drew was very hard on himself and this left our relationship very unpredictable and noncommittal.  It was hard to watch over the years and was always the reason it never moved into anything more than a friendship. There was a lack of dissatisfaction that robbed him and us of enjoying each other. Literally after years of this cycle, I let go and knew it would never change.

I want to say I loved Marco, Giana’s dad, but I don’t know if I truly did.  I was willing to love him and freely gave my love to him, but we didn’t have enough time to develop a true love for one another.  I think I may love him more now than ever, because I want him to be happy and whole. When we were married and together, I wanted him to fulfill my vision of marriage, family and life and that does not really sound like love.  I wanted a child a family, and he gave me Giana. For that I love him and am forever grateful.

I preface all of these people to layout my journey in understanding love.  I needed to know what love was not in order to understand what it was.

My love for Joseph, my husband, is undoubtedly a true love story.  We were friends for 4 years while working together. He saw me in my most difficult sad time of my life after I had married Marco, during my pregnancy, separation and divorce.  Over the years, I realized I needed to be around him, looking for any reason or excuse and then when I moved to Texas I missed him so much, that I knew I loved him. They love for him crept up on me over the years and had taken root before I could mentally process it.  Our love has weathered many storms, and even though we have wavered, faltered and probably done some of the wrong things in a relationship having a life without one another was just never an option for us. We belong to one another. We both feel that and that’s why it’s love.

Beyond Joe and my romantic relationships, I truly loved my Grandfather, Cleatis.  What a name! Ha! He joked that they were all out of Bobs and Bills when we was born, so they named him Cleatis.  We had a special relationship. He loved me and we spent a lot of time together when I grew up all the way through college when I had lived with him, my mother and grandmother.  We loved to poke fun at each other and see who could say the funniest thing to take one another by surprise. This is super inappropriate, but as a WWII veteran he’d respond to my sarcastic jokes with a “you better watch it or I’m gonna send you a letter bomb,” in his thick Texan accent.  Ahhh, that just cracks me up when I think about it.

Definitely, Taylor Clark my childhood best friend goes on this list of people I I have loved; Friends since we were 10 years old.  She will always have a place in my life. Over the years we’ve ebbed in our lives philosophies, but know when we can count on one another.  We also intuitively understand one another.

There are many more friends and family I could mention, but these are the ones that I have loved, the ones who have loved me just as I am, all the time over many years.