Oh, okay, I’m really almost 57. You’d think I’d have learned something about love by now. Well, I guess I have, but I think I’ve gone about it the hard way. And when it comes to love,  I’m a very slow learner. Plus I need lots of repetition. If it’s true that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes, I’ve got a whole Encyclopedia of Brittanica worth of learning.

Valentine’s Day approaches. It’s of those holidays designed to make people feel miserable for lacking what we assume everyone else has more and better of than we do. Like New Year’s Eve, it’s it’s often a painful, and sometimes public, status check on how we’re faring in the love department.

In ironic celebration of the season for romantic love, I’ll confess here that that a very important love relationship in my life seems to be irreparably broken. (No, this is not about you, Mr. World Revolves Around Me.)

Even at this age, lessons in love can feel like a crack across the kneecaps and put you in a not showered or dressed for days kinda funk. I guess the universe really wants me to pay attention this time.

It is heartbreaking, soul-crunching actually, when the veil lifts, and I see we were not what I thought we were. Wished? Pretended? Fooled myself into believing? Sometimes we want something so much, we create a mirage for fulfillment. Can’t blame the other guy when I’m the mirage-maker. I think I’ve got that lesson down now. Maybe.

As always, it’s all my fault. (Not really, but that’s what I will tell myself. As always.)  I am grateful for lessons and for resilience, even though I could do with fewer reasons for either.