When I was 23, I developed an infatuation for, and then fell hard for, someone with whom our relationship never got out of the “friend zone.” He and I were in the choir together, singing two Masses together every Sunday; the first one with the choir and the second as a duet.
For the most part of the year when our lives crossed paths, he wasn’t dating anyone. And there I was, right there all along, feeling very frustrated that he had no interest in me. It was like a knife in my heart every time he made a comment that started out, “If I had a girlfriend. . .”
I would have done anything for him, and I did do things – crazy things that you do when intoxicated by that feeling of being “in love.” Playing hard to get was out the window; I put myself all out there trying to win his heart. Being so close and so far away at the same time was pure torture, but I didn’t quit hoping that one day the friendship would develop into something more.
That all ended on June 18, 2000. So painful is the memory that the date is seared into my mind. After the second Mass that day, he stepped off the altar, and met up with a gal out in the pews. The two of them walked out of the church hand in hand.
I have yet to experience a death in my family or among my friends that hurt as much as that moment. It is hard to describe the grief I felt watching him choose someone else. I knew him well enough to know the moment that it happened that he’d marry her. And I was right.
There’s a song on the My Best Friend’s Wedding soundtrack by Amanda Marshall called “I’ll be okay.” The song had a line that summed up, heartbreakingly, what I understood at that moment: “I’ll always have the memories; She’ll always have you.”
I wondered for a long time after that experience what the point of it was. I’d wasted a year of my life pining away for this guy. I would often ask God, “was there something I was supposed to learn from that experience?”
I got the answer in 2003, in two profound lines from a silly movie, Bruce Almighty:
Bruce: How do you make someone love you without affecting their free will?
God: Welcome to my world, son. If you come up with an answer to that one, you let me know.
That dialogue affected me so deeply the moment I heard it, it’s a wonder I paid any attention to the rest of the movie. At that moment, I got it. That whole experience had been a gift.
God is right beside us all along, waiting for us to turn to Him. He too does crazy things for love of us and not only “puts Himself all out there,” He gave all of Himself for us, and continues to give us all of Himself, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity every Mass.
What an intense pain it must be to love someone so deeply – infinitely deeply than the love I had, and to be rejected constantly.
The gift I received was getting an infinitesimally tiny taste of the sorrow Christ experienced in Gethsemane, knowing He would go to His death for love of us, and some would refuse that love and be lost forever.
What I gained through that suffering was a better understanding of the pain I cause God when I reject Him through sin. The experience of not being loved taught me how to love God.
Further reading: The Spirituality of Unrequited Love
