by Joelle Steele

Earth Wind & Fire once sang, “Somethin’ happened along the way/What used to be happy was sad.” How did it all start? What happened? What went wrong? Was it always wrong and you just didn’t see it? Did you see it and just hope things would change? How did it end? And, more importantly, how do you go on after the love is gone? I have asked myself these questions quite a few times. I have dated numerous men in my life, and I have been in six romantic relationships. They didn’t all end badly, but they didn’t all end happily either.

My first relationships were all about age. Both too young. Mr. Right #1 was my high school boyfriend. We got along well, but we were headed for colleges in opposite ends of California. We ended when I graduated from high school in 1969, but I introduced him to his wife, and we remained friends until his death forty years later. Mr. Right #2 was my first husband. We were together for about five years total. The marriage ended in 1975 because neither of us really thought through where we were each going in life together. Again, we remained friends to this day.

After these first two relationships, I did a lot of dating. I went out with about 20 or so different men. I wanted to know what men were really like in general, and I wanted to be sure that the next man in my life really was Mr. Right. I had a set of questions that I used to find out what a man was like before I even entered into further conversation with him. I had discovered that asking a man what kind of work he did was very revealing. That was my first question. I wasn’t interested in his job. I was interested in what he said about what he did for a living. I heard so many men immediately launch into how awful their job or their boss was, how their ex-wife or ex-girlfriend, was hitting them up for support, etc. Sorry, my dear, I have to go powder my nose …

On the rare occasion that I met a man who did not gripe about how awful his life was, I went out with him, sometimes only once, sometimes several times. Dating was different in the 1970s. People spent more time going out, not just hopping into bed with everyone they met the way young people of the 1970s are so often depicted. You dated someone to find out more about them to see if you would be compatible before you declared your undying love.

So, when I entered into my next relationship in 1976, I was very sure that he was Mr. Right #3. We were an excellent fit in every way. He was nine years older, a widower with a 2-1/2 year-old son. We were living together early on, got along perfectly, and I loved being a mother to his beautiful little boy. But then a double-tragedy struck. Just two months short of two years together, his son died from a previously undiagnosed head injury sustained when, as an infant, he and his mother were in an accident caused by a drunk driver that took his mother’s life. I was devastated, and so was his father who had a complete breakdown, disappeared leaving all his belongings and his career behind, and was never heard from again. I hired a private investigator to try to find him, and his best friend made inquiries of everyone they both knew to see if anyone had heard from him. He’s still missing to this day, and I still miss him to this day.

I didn’t think I would ever recover from this double loss and I had entered into therapy to deal with my very unsettling grief. But, before any of this happened, I had unknowingly already met Mr. Right #4, my future second husband. He was 13 years older, and we were friends for about seven months before we went out on a date in 1978. I was surprised at how great this relationship was. I had been so grief-stricken for so long, and suddenly all that sadness lifted. I felt like it had to be too good to be true. But it wasn’t. But we had one giant problem, and that was that I had to move away and we were having seemingly unresolvable problems dealing with a long-distance relationship. In 1980, we parted amicably after three years, and both of us went into other relationships.

My relationship with Mr. Right #5 began in 1981, and it turned out to be a relationship with Mr. Wrong. It ended after almost three years when I found him in bed with another woman. And that’s the end of that story.

Meanwhile, Mr. Right #4 had just ended a relationship of the same duration, and we talked about it at length on the phone one night. We decided to try harder to work out our long-distance issues. We did, and we resumed our relationship, eventually getting married. We were together for a total of 15 years, but the last two were a nightmare. His life had been marked by the loss of all four of his remaining family members and his best friend who was also his long-time business partner. This happened to him over a two-year period. He started drinking, and the drinking eventually became a daily occurrence that started in the morning when he woke up and ended only when he went to sleep at night. He was a sad drunk, and his life was falling apart, and it was all affecting my life as well. He wouldn’t get help, and I went to Al-Anon which was no help to me at all. I ended the relationship in 1994. But, while the relationship ended, my love for him never did. We didn’t divorce until many years later, but in the meantime, he continuously called me, always drunk, and begged me to take him back. In 2017, I divorced him “in absentia,” after numerous attempts to locate him failed. He was a wonderful man who I will always love, and I miss him to this day.

In 1999, long before I divorced Mr. Right #4, I had moved on to Mr. Right #6, a man 12 years younger. This was a relationship that I ended in 2002, and that I often regret having ended, since he was a great guy in every way, and our three years together were really good ones. So why did I trash this great relationship? It was something I should have thought through before we became involved. First, when I met Mr. Right #6, I was still very much in love with Mr. Right #4 and hoped he would stop drinking and that everything would go back to normal for us. I know, totally unrealistic, but my heart is not always in sync with my head. Second, I had always wanted to move from California, where I was born and raised, to the state of Washington where all my family was located. I loved Washington and I loved my family but couldn’t afford the move. When the financial opportunity presented itself for me to move, I talked to him about it, trying to find out if he would like to move there with me. He didn’t. Not at all. No way in hell, etc. Bottom line, we split, he refused to speak to me again, and three years later I moved.

So what really happens after the love is gone? Well, for me, I mourn the loss, try to figure out what really went wrong, and then, I move on. I firmly believe that when things go wrong in a relationship, both parties have to bear their full share of responsibility for the break-up. I can see that my relationships with Mr. Right #1 and #2 were stepping stones into adult relationships. Could I have done anything to keep them alive? Probably. I could have gone to a college near where my high school boyfriend was going. I could have gone to marriage counseling with my first husband. And as for Mr. Right #3, I’m not sure what I could have done there since it was clearly a matter of circumstances beyond my control, and pretty much beyond his control too. With Mr. Right #5 (during my hiatus from Mr. Right #4), I simply cannot forgive cheating. I can forgive almost anything, but not that kind of betrayal. And as for Mr. Right #4, you can’t control another person’s behaviors. I could have lived with them and continued in my own misery as a result. But, I don’t really see anything that I could personally have done to improve the situation. As for Mr. Right #6, that was all on me. My fault from start to finish. I wrote him a letter about a year after I moved apologizing to him for ending the relationship and for starting it in the first place when I knew I had always wanted to move to Washington. He didn’t respond.

So now, as I write this, it’s 2021, I’m 70 years old, and I’ve been in a relationship with Mr. Right #7 for two and a half years. Like all relationships, it has its ups and downs, and time will tell how it all pans out. Hopefully, in the future, I won’t have to be asking the Earth Wind & Fire question about what happens after the love is gone.