One of my proofreaders was checking a synopsis for a novel and commented, “There’s a lot of sex in this.” The couple the novel are still young in their early 30s. They’ve obviously had some life experience and neither one is shy about their needs for intimacy. However, it’s about much more. Neither the man or the women want to commit to a relationship because of past events. It’s really about the difficulty of pairing up for life. Because it’s such a rich source of material for writing, I have thought a lot about the why’s and wherefore’s of it.
The first would be the pure biological side of our pairing up. Simply stated, if we didn’t pair up there wouldn’t be any human race. It is hormone driven. We acknowledge that was saying things such as “raging hormones.” Scientifically it may be very interesting, but I’m afraid I couldn’t write either a short story or novel that would hang together using just scientific fact.
With that said, let’s move on to the interesting parts of pairing up after acknowledging that it is hormone driven. One of the first lessons they tell you about writing is “write what you know about.” In thinking about it, I have divided it up into three stages as they occurred in my life. The first stage is when you first begin to notice the opposite sex. You’re not quite sure what to do about it. Then you find someone you like and you worry about such things as how do you kiss? Those sorts of questions belong is something called young adult fiction. I have never written in that genre.
The second stage would revolve around my first wife. I have written about her in the blog and if you haven’t read any of those, you might want to check out this page. It was an initial reaction of wanting to get to know each other. It was clear to both of us that we wanted it to move on to a physical relationship, but the mores of the day prohibited that. I was in the Army at that point and when my orders came or Vietnam, we decided to get married. The second decision we made was that in case something happened to me she wouldn’t be left with the child support by herself. When I returned from Vietnam, I returned to college. Our relationship was that of young lovers. We enjoyed almost everything we did together with few exceptions. When she died in childbirth, it felt like a whole part of me had gone missing. I did not want to date again. My mother-in-law insisted that I dated and even came up with possible candidates for a wife explaining that every young man needs a woman in his life.
I met many very nice women between my two marriages. At first, I was afraid to fall in love because in my mind my love for my first wife had caused her death. The first time I kissed a woman I panicked and fled. It took the caring friendship of a woman to slowly bring me out of my fear of falling in love. This fear became a rich source of feelings to mine for my writing. Unlike earlier in my life, I considered potential mates more carefully. Intimacy was available because of the change in mores anytime I wanted it, but there had to be something much more solid between a woman and myself before I would consider marrying her.
I am sure we all go through some phases and I’m also sure that they are very different for each person. We all need someone we can trust in love to be with us unconditionally. It can be a difficult struggle and from what I’ve seen, some of us never succeed or seemed to succeed as the world sees us but in reality we remain lonely. Think about your story and the stories of those you know around you. You will find some amazing stories.
