Loving somebody and...

I recently read a very interesting piece. Its one of the "Lisa Kogan Tells All" series from O, The Oprah Magazine…and am going to quote from it below.

"...Loving somebody and then having the guts to let them love you back doesn't always come easy. For the first three years of our life together I kept waiting for him to rip off his Mr. Nice Guy mask and turn into every boy who ever broke my heart. I poked, I prodded, I harangued, I guilted, I entrapped, I tested, I stopped short of waterboarding. But Johannes refused to take the bait. Instead, he maintained his calm, retained his benevolence, and developed migraines.

He made sure I understood that he was in it for the long haul...The man makes me feel loved - even when he hates me. And that, I've come to realize, is no small thing.

I have a friend, we'll call her Jane...Jane is married to this guy, let's call him Dick...I've had fun with Dick and Jane; we've gone to the theater and dinner and a couple of Knicks games together. With Johannes frequently in Europe, I became like a little dinghy tied to the boat of their marriage, just kind of bobbing along behind them in case of an emergency. One Sunday a few years ago, we were brunching in SoHo...Anyway, Jane knocked over her water glass, prompting Dick to spend the rest of the meal excoriating her for every single misstep she'd ever made. He opened his rant with "Christ, it's excruciating to sit next to you at a table," and closed with a reference to her "fat idiot sister." Check please!

Jane called the next morning to apologize for making me part of their Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? production. I wanted to say, You're not the one who should be sorry. I wanted to say, Your only mistake was in not lobbing the basket of stale sweet rolls at his head...I wanted to say, Janey, Janey, Janey, what's become of your self-respect? I wanted to say, It's not whether somebody loves you...it's how he treats you that counts. I found myself wondering: Is Jane afraid to be alone? Is it a money thing? Maybe she's an unindicted co-conspirator, provoking him in some way that I'm just not seeing? Or maybe she woke up one morning and 22 years and two sons had simply come and gone - right along with her energy and confidence. Maybe she just forgot who she'd wanted to be when she grew up. In the end all I managed was, "I'm here if you need me."

It makes just so much sense...something that I can relate to...especially the 1st para, where I can easily replace Johannes with A.