I’ve met a few people in my life that felt like I knew them from before. I’ve had a number of very close relationships with women that were not sexual, although, had I not been married and they not been married, probably could have gone that way. These relationships came and went. I think they are not sustainable if you don’t get married and you stop working together. They require the energy that comes from being with someone every day.
Intimacy is not that hard for me. It’s easy for me to become close to women, anyway. But just because it’s easy to get intimate, doesn’t mean that a relationship has the kind of depth that a marriage has. There’s something that happens when you live with someone and you work through life every day together that builds a different kind of intimacy that holds together in a way that workplace relationships cannot do.
I have been in a place where I had the first kind of intimacy, and I hungered for the second kind—the day to day living together kind—but it just never went that way, and so eventually the original intimacy fades away and becomes unsustainable. Of course, there isn’t enough time in my life for all the loves I could have had. Sometimes, though, there are new loves that insist on replacing the old ones. That is when life becomes pretty impossible. You can not give up your marriage, but you also can not give up this new person in your life who perhaps you would have married in some other universe that you do not happen to inhabit. It is a sad thing that you can not have both loves, and yet it is a blessing to know that other loves can come into your life.