"If you have it [Love], you don’t need to have anything else, and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter much what else you have." – Sir James M. Barrie
Once I came to feel that someone who I thought loved me didn’t really love me after all… or at least not in the way that mattered to me. His love had been dishonest and more self-involved than I wanted, a love that seemed was for his sake rather than ours. A few days after we broke up, I had to give a big talk at an event – me being billed as the "sex expert", the person who was supposed to know so much about love and sex and relationships.
I remember showing up to give the talk, with people walking up to me to say that they always read my sex advice columns, someone even asked for an autograph (which shocked me), and they remembered me from another event, and congratulated me on certain recent successes and such, and generally people seemed to think that I had it all. Or at least that I had quite a lot going for me. However, inside I felt sad and despondent and like I had nothing… even though the break-up was a good thing. I felt completely at a loss and acutely aware of the irony, and whatever bad sex karma I had earned, of having to show up and talk about relationships and love and sex at a time when I was hurting enormously because of these exact things. Because of that experience (and others – just because I know about sex and love doesn’t mean I’ve been able to escape their clutches), the above quote matters to me.
On a more positive note, most of the time in my adult life I have been very fortunate to have good love, even when it seemed I had nothing else. And for that, the first part of the quote has been true too, and I’m grateful.
