Love catches us by surprise, again and again

[Spoiler alert: some details & a quote from the book “A man called Ove” by Fredrik Backman.]

In the beautiful book “A man called Ove” by Fredrik Backman, when Ove ends up in the hospital and one of his neighbors goes to check on him, she finds herself suddenly overwhelmed by her concern for Ove and the author, describing her emotions, writes “Love is a strange thing. It takes you by surprise. […]” 

Yes, love does take us by surprise. 

In the spring of 2023, I thought I’d just be reactivating an intellectual, queerplatonic friendship with the European queer visiting scientist that had already spent a few months at the institute where I worked the previous year. But within a few weeks of their arrival in Colorado, as we quickly reconnected despite months of silence, our friendship evolved rapidly, and surprisingly, from intellectual to deeply emotional and then also sexual to one of the greatest loves of my life. Our separation and subsequent complete loss of connection, total silence, left me devastated for months. After our painful separation two years ago, initially I needed to distance myself from them. Once I was ready to reconnect and talk to them, it was too late: they didn’t want to talk to me anymore and never, ever replied to any of my messages again. So most of my rituals to find closure and healing in 2023-2024 involved erasing my European queer ex-lover from my life, e.g by burying all the objects related to them and considering them “effectively dead” by making a “tomb” for them. They had rejected me from their life so I rejected them from mine. Almost as if I was tearing or cutting off a piece of me.

Despite the comfort I got from those rituals that I did by myself, it was only this summer, two years later, on my solo trip to South Dakota, that I truly, deeply, and wholly made peace with the circumstances of that relationship (including the painful separation). 

A couple weeks ago, I was telling a good friend about some thoughts and dreams that I had been having about my European queer ex-lover, and his surprised response was, “Oh, but I thought you had made peace with them and that relationship”. He said it as if “making peace” meant “forgetting” or “never thinking about something again” or “never talking about someone again”. 

But no, for me “making peace” is quite the opposite: for me, “making peace” means allowing that event or person or part of my life to be truly and fully accepted by me and integrated into myself. It means acknowledging to myself the importance that a person or event really had to me while also recognizing what went wrong, admitting what I wish had gone — or I/we had done — differently. 

Love for my European queer ex-lover caught me totally by surprise in the spring/summer of 2023. And in a sense it caught me again by surprise recently as I dreamed about them so vividly. 

I have made peace with what happened with them that summer of two years ago. I’ve made peace with the fact that part of it was simply the “wrong timing”, “too soon for me”, with the fact that “I wasn’t ready”. I’ve made peace with the mistakes we made, with how poorly we handled some things, particularly the separation. I have made peace with all that pain. But I have also made peace with the importance that person had in my life, with the love I felt for them and still feel for them now. I have made peace with the fact that they will always have a place in my heart, they will always be a piece of me and a piece that I don’t want to tear off. 

And I have made peace with the fact that I may still think of them and dream of them and even miss them sometimes. Because love catches us by surprise, again and again.