Читать книгу How They Met - David Friedman - Страница 10

Author’s Foreword

A number of years ago, I found myself suddenly and shockingly single after having been in a fifteen-year relationship. Over the next six months, I went through all the normal stages that people tend to go through after this kind of loss; I traveled, told my story to everyone I could think of, renewed old friendships, threw myself into my work, stepped up my therapy, and slowly, with very little success or satisfaction, began to date.

About six weeks after the breakup, I was lying in bed one night feeling sorry for myself, wondering how I would ever have a life, when a very encouraging thought came to me. Being a songwriter, I put that thought into words, and the result was a song, the lyric to which is written above.

As time went by, I began to remember what I had known fifteen years before and forgotten over the years of steady committed relationship—that meeting the right person is something that is, in many ways, very much out of our hands. People had all sorts of advice for me: “Go out and meet everyone you can; Just sit still and it will happen; You’ve got to be aggressive; Don’t be too pushy; When you see a quality you don’t want in someone, stop dating them immediately; Be open; Be cautious; Give it time; Get yourself in good shape; Don’t change a thing; You have to change something inside you to allow yourself to meet the right person,” etc., etc., ad nauseam. But no matter what I did, it seemed to me that it was going to happen when it was going to happen, and the best I could do was be open and take whatever opportunities were being offered to me, whether or not they seemed to have to do with finding the next love of my life. It felt like a pretty helpless position to be in.

Over the months, just for the fun of it, I began asking people who were married or were in longstanding relationships how they met. In each case, there was some element of serendipity or surprise, and I found the stories encouraging, supporting the notion that it would happen for me if I could just live my life and let go. Also encouraging was the fact that meeting the love of one’s life did not seem to depend on one’s being in particularly good shape, looking good, being successful, being happy at the time, planning, targeting, doing the right thing, or anything else for that matter that one could put one’s finger on. In fact, people often met the love of their lives while dressed in dirty old clothes, or while in the middle of a deep depression, or at a time when they absolutely were not looking.

As I listened to story after story, gradually the feeling that I was helpless and that it would never happen for me changed to a sense of wonder and excitement as to when, where, and how it would happen for me. The words of my own song, “And that will be our story, I can’t wait to live our story” ran through my head over and over.

I thought it would be therapeutic for me, during this time, to collect and write down these stories, and then realized that perhaps a book of them would be encouraging for the millions of people who find themselves in similar situations, in love or in anything else that they desire but don’t know how to make happen.

Some of these stories were told to me directly by the people who lived them. Others were told to me secondhand. In those cases, I have either changed or omitted the names to protect people’s privacy.

Straight, gay, young, old, longtime single, divorced, widowed, looking, not looking—these are stories about ordinary people like you and me, and the ordinary yet extraordinary events that brought them together with their life partner. I hope you enjoy them, find inspiration and encouragement, and perhaps even recognize your own circumstances in them. And whatever you’re searching for, be it love, success, healing, money, work, a new home, or a new direction, know that it’s entirely possible, no matter what the present circumstances, that you will soon have a new story of your own to tell.