MEET THE AUTHORS
of
If Only I Could Tell You: Where Past Loves and Current Intimacy Meet
We have been partners for twelve years, eleven of them as husband and wife. Because we have chosen to work together within our relationship to unveil and explore feelings that endure from our most soulful earlier loves, we are particularly qualified to write about the question of talking about past loves.
When we became romantic partners, we already had a close emotional bond from a seventeen year friendship. We felt that we could, with relative safety, continue to share feelings about even our most recent prior loves. Who but a partner who was also a trusted friend could better respond to that complex web of love and loss?
And so that we would not endlessly put off facing what we found most difficult about forming a lasting partnership, we set a one year limit on how long we would live together without making a deeper commitment. This choice point offered us the opportunity to participate in what we half-jokingly called Relationship 505, an "intimacy intensive." It was a chance for us to engage with barriers to knowing and being known that we had been unwilling or unable to identify in previous relationships. At the end of that year we would each decide, privately, whether we wanted to marry or go our separate ways. If one or both of us chose the latter, we would work together to return to our former loving friendship. And each of us had a sense that, even if we chose not to stay together long-term, we would have learned a lot about ourselves in the mirror of a truly intimate relationship.
During that first year, we consciously chose to elicit, and share, deep and subtle emotions which often go unexpressed within a relationship. We held ourselves accountable for making conscious choices about discussing all relationship-related issues, even if the particulars might be unsettling. And because our daily journals put us in touch with our angers, longings, fears and uncertainties, it was difficult to avoid awareness of what was relevant.
Feelings of love for, and loss of, our former partners occupied a warm corner in the internal reality of each of us. And as one way to insure that we did not unconsciously avoid this sensitive material, we agreed to create an opportunity for deep emotional exploration. Leon would read aloud the unedited journal entry he had recorded the previous year, during the several months he had been with his most recent–and most significant–past love. There, for each of us to experience in our own way, were his private and unguarded thoughts and feelings about a specific love and loss. These readings, done on the anniversary date of when they were written, pulled us into the vortex of our greatest vulnerabilities.
Predictably, this "intensive" brought us into the dance between trust and fear, a tension familiar to anyone in an intimate relationship. And since we no longer had the emotional distance (and safety) we had when we were friends but not lovers, it was harder to be there for each other when our insecurities flared.
Yet, over time, the practice of paying attention to our own (and each other's) feelings about past loves and to other potential tender spots has led us to better see, and accept, ourselves and one another. As we become more able to recognize our insecurities, we can, more and more often, step out from behind our defenses and transform discomfort and fear into understanding and confidence. Our ongoing conversation about past loves, within the context of disclosing who we really are, has become the crucible in which an even deeper bond between us has been forged.
As partners who are fully engaged with our loves and losses, we have opened realms of the heart not available by any other means, even with a friend or a therapist. That experience enabled us, in interviews for If Only I Could Tell You, to ask questions and listen from the depth of understanding born of truly having been there. And that deep understanding informed our written discussions of the complex nature of sharing past loves.
For another glimpse into the authors' journey together and more about how this book came to be, visit PRELUDE.