Finally Finished..."10 Loves"

"there is a woman at the beginning of all great things." - alphonse de lamartine

“i’m thirty-one years old and i’ve loved women in those thirty-one years. one, two, ten…who knows? well, i know and ten sounds about right. but for some reason i can't determine if that number’s high or low or good or bad; to me it’s just a number of women that i've loved. sometimes i wonder if ten’s a lot, or a little, or i don’t know, a significant amount of women to have loved by the age of thirty-one. because there are times when any number seems an exorbitant amount of people to say you’ve loved before your hair start graying. but my hair’s already graying so i guess that’s not the best correlation between age and love. and that ten is made worse when you consider the huge gaps of time that went by in going from one love to another. there have been times, stretches that have lasted years, where i loved all of them; but none of them in actuality.

and i don’t just mean physically loved either, i mean felt feelings for; felt happy being with. i mean i had to think if i had even kissed all of them and i haven’t or hadn’t or whatever. never held some of their hands; never shared a romantic moment with; in fact, i never even told some of them. i guess i figure that when i discovered for myself what i thought love was, there have been women i have felt it for. i love these women for helping to mold me into the man that i am. they all taught me something about love, what i believe about it and how it shaped who i am today. every experience, positive or negative, was one i needed in order to become better that i was. and i can say that after having been with each woman, i became better due to the lessons i learned from them. i recognize i felt something more than friendship with all of them. i’ve come to realize that if i can imagine myself with a life that includes a woman as my partner, i love that woman…because that’s a hard thing for me to do. my goal’s forever and it’s often difficult to see myself and another person together that long.

but based on the criteria that i gave, ten isn’t really a lot for someone who has always been geared more towards having his own family than living the single life. so what i thought i had ten possibilities at the future i want? until i get that future the number’s probably gonna go up. eleven…twelve…twenty…who knows how long it’s gonna take?"

sometime in '10. just finished today. i think.