The Many Loves of My Life ...

While watching an episode of a bad 90s WB show, one of the characters posed a question that really got me thinking.  The question was, “How many times have you been in love?”.  My wheels started to turn.  For me, that is not an easy question to answer.  There are several people I thought I loved at the time, and maybe I did, but looking back, I am not sure it was really love.  For the sake of an entertaining blog post, I have decided to share with you the many boys I have loved.  

Daniel: The High School Boyfriend
Daniel was my first, and actually only, boyfriend.  We dated for two years.  I was a 15 year-old freshman, and he was a junior from a different school.  I will never forget how his shaggy hair flipped out from under his baseball cap and how hot I thought I was in my no-pocket jeans the night we met.  His goofy smile made me giddy, and I lived for the moments we would dance in the moonlight next to his pickup truck.  I wish I could remember the first time we said “I Love you”, especially since he was the first boy to whom I had ever said the words.  Spring of his senior year, things began to fall apart.  The thought of him at college and me tying him to our small town was overwhelming.  I broke my first love’s heart while sitting in my childhood living room on a Wednesday afternoon.  Maybe that is why every other person I have ever loved has broken mine.

You never really stop loving the first person you give your heart to.  Post-college I had the opportunity to fall in love with my first love all over again.  Daniel and I talked all through college, but when I graduated it became more frequent.  I got to know the man he had become and I loved everything about him.  When I told him how I felt, my move to DC was looming.  I would have stayed for him, but he didn’t ask me to.  I got to feel what he felt when I broke his heart.  

Caleb: The Summer Romance turned Long Distance Whatever
Caleb was the first boy to ever tell me I was beautiful.  We met at church camp the summer before my freshman year of high school.  I was a camper, and he was an older lifeguard.  His clear blue eyes and swoopy blonde hair had me weak at the knees. After dancing with me at the farewell dance, we exchanged addresses and emails.  (This was before I had a cell phone.)  We would chat on AIM.  I started to date Daniel, so we talked less.  The following summer, Daniel and I had broken up, and I returned to camp to be a Counselor-in-Training.  After 2 flirtatious weeks of “giving us a shot”, Caleb ended things when I left camp.  We continued to talk, and flirt on and off for the rest of high school.  

Caleb and I were famous for our big fights.  Our mutual friends knew we were a train wreck together, but we couldn’t seem to stay away from each other.  There are very few people that I have encountered that could make me feel so euphoric and then so broken.  My freshman year of college, in the middle of a tornado watch, I drove to spend the night with him.  I finally got to kiss that first boy that called me beautiful.  Everything about it was wrong; it felt so cheap.  After what seemed like real romance over the years, it just ended when I drove away.  I thought I loved Caleb, and I think that I did in the way that an unjaded heart can.  Caleb and I were the definition of complicated, and he was the beginning of my vicious pattern.  

Bryan: The “I Love You” Friend
My first week of college, I was out with the girls from my dorm, and an older boy bought us drinks.  That older boy got my number and invited me to a party at his house.  Bryan’s blue eyes and charming ways were two of the main reasons he was the first boy I kissed in college.  He quickly decided that one of my dorm friends was more his style but insisted on us staying friends.  She didn’t last in either of our lives.  Bryan lived with a group of boys that became family to me.  I slept on their couch after parties, or sometimes they would even give up their beds.  Every crisis that came up, Bryan was my shoulder to cry on.  My feelings for him were constantly changing.  I would think I had things figured out - know our friendship was the most important thing - and he would get drunk and get jealous.  We would have these heart-wrenching fights that he would not remember the next day, but I would be stuck with the battle wounds.  

The first party after Christmas break, I said something, that in the few seconds before his response, I thought would ruin everything.  When “I love you” slipped out, I never expected him to say “I love you too”, but he did.  That was not the last time.  He started ending our phone conversations by telling me he loved me, and I would say it back.  When he would screw up, he thought “I Love you” was a get out of jail free card.  I convinced myself our love for each other was the same, and that denial was a heavy burden.

When I told him I was in love with him a year and a half later, I couldn’t believe that he was shocked.  The fight we had that night had atomic bomb level destruction.   I was tired of him saying he wanted a girl just like me when he could just have me. Or when he was jealous, and said that I was one of the coolest girls he knew, but I just wasn’t “dating material”.  His promise that this wouldn’t ruin us, and that we would talk about it sober were lies.  I always knew that we were never meant to be together, but I couldn’t help the fact that I loved him.The night I told Bryan I was in love with him was the last real conversation we have ever had.  My belief that we would figure things out and he would always be a part of my life was false.       

Adam: The Friend with Emotional Benefits
The day that the rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed cutie sat on my row in my Comparative Politics class, I could not contain myself.  The fact that we did a class project by rows that day was like a gift from the gods.  I was outwardly determined to stay friends with Adam, regardless of how attracted to him I was, but internally, of course, I hoped he would fall for me.  I don’t remember why we started texting and calling each other, probably something to do with class.  When I asked him to Halloween date party, I said it was as just friends.  I gave him a set of 5 rules, 2 of which were: Don’t try to kiss me and Do not fall in love with me.  We drank and danced, and were both hot messes when we got off the bus.  I was determined to go to a frat party across campus, so he walked me there.  After his attempts to hold my hand, I told him he didn’t care about me, and I knew he would rather be there with my best friend.  I will never forget sitting on the steps of the English department and his answer: “If I didn’t care about you, we would be in my car on the way to my place.  If I wanted to be with Bee, then I would be sitting next to her.”  He wiped my drunken tears and as we got up and started walking he stopped and kissed me. This kiss was brief and very hazy; I even pretended not to remember it.  I think that was the biggest mistake I have ever made.  

After that date party, we began texting and calling almost daily.  I would pick his drunk ass up from the bar on a Tuesday, and he would tell me how much his sisters would love me.  We liked all the same things and even stayed up watching election results together.  Emotionally, we were dependent on each other, but were never physical.  We had plans to visit each other over the Christmas holidays, and my dad even got him a ticket to go to a professional football game with my family.  I felt like I had met the person that I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with.  Looking at him, I could see our future and I wanted nothing more in the world.  

Christmas formal rolled around, and Adam agreed to be my date, even though he had an offer to go to the SEC Football Championship.  I just knew that this was going to be the night that changed everything, and it was.  We were sitting in a booth taking a break from dancing, when a sorority sister said “Y’all are such a cute couple.”  He told her we were just friends.  I looked at him and said, “Are we really ‘just friends’?”, and his answer was like a million daggers to my heart.  “Yes, we are just friends.  I only want to be friends.”  It was if someone had ripped my chest open and removed a part of me.  I couldn’t breathe.  The rest of that night is a blur of tears, strong drinks, and more pain than I care to share.  

We tried to be friends after that, but Adam was a constant contradiction.  In hindsight, I think he was trying to disappoint me.  Being me, I laid it all on the line, in writing.  I pointed out all the things he did that screamed the opposite of “just friends”, and I left our future up to him.  It was 46 days from that email to the day I ran into him on campus.  He later told me that he didn’t know how to express his feelings, to put it on the line the way I did.  He didn’t regret anything about the time he spent with me, but he did regret hurting me.  When you think you have met the love of your life, and they chose not to love you back, it forms a hole inside of you - one that you never know if you can ever fill again.  

Liam: The Forbidden Co-Worker
A week after I started my first real-world job, my first batch of interns started.  In that batch, there was one boy, a beautiful, well dressed, blond boy with kind blue eyes.  Liam had a smile that could light up the whole world.  We quickly became friends, g-chatting and grabbing drinks after work.  He would do the sweetest things for me, like surprise me with a milkshake when I was having a bad day.  I knew, as long as he was my intern, nothing could ever happen, AND he had just been through a terrible breakup.  He would listen to me vent about things in the office, and I would give him advice on how to deal with his ex.  I was falling head over heels for him, but I just knew there was no way he reciprocated those feelings.  When my parents came to town, he talked to them while they waited for me and told them he knew that we would always be a part of each other’s lives.  With every conversation, every sweet comment, every time he told me I looked pretty, I slipped deeper into the black hole that is unrequited love.  

One night, we were out with a big group of friends, and his roommate said something that I wish I could go back and un-hear.  He told me that Liam really cared about me.  I replied that I knew that he valued our friendship.  Michael said, “No Harper, he really cares about you.  He doesn’t need as much time to move on as you think.  Don’t wait forever.”  I let that give me a glimmer of hope that one day, when we didn’t work together, things would be different.  After a trip to the Kentucky Derby with a big group of our friends, I realized I would never live up to his ex.  Even if the way he looked at me made my heart melt, or the fact that he wanted to know my opinion on everything, made me weak.  Being friends meant he would always be in my life.    

I think back on all the girls I encouraged him to take on dates.  Forcing myself to suppress my feelings and acting as just his friend was my inner turmoil.  I told myself that having him as a friend was better than losing him.  Yet, I lost him anyway.  He shut me out, leaving me to sit in an office with him everyday and not know his thoughts.  It felt like a thousand needles being shoved into my heart slowly, over and over again.  I still don’t know why he stopped talking to me, and I have asked him more times than I can count.  Loving him was one of the most painful things I have ever endured.  Losing him nearly broke me beyond compare.  He has been gone from my office for over a year. I never see him.  I have done my best to move on, but I still wonder if someday he might love me too.  


I have loved more than some people will in a lifetime and felt pain that some will never know.  I have been very open with my heart, but the people I gave it to have been very reckless with it.  I don’t regret the fact that I have fallen hard and fast several times in my life.  I am a passionate person, and it is a very big part of what makes me me.  I do not love as easily as I once did, and that is likely a result of all the times I have loved, only to have my heart broken in return.  Every one of these boys taught me something about myself and about people.  I am stronger because of them.  One day the real, great love of my life will decide to show up, and when he does, I will realize that yes, I had loved, but there is no love like reciprocated love.