by Maggie Voysest

It was almost love, could have been love, should have been love!!

“You are everything I never knew I always wanted”

That line from “Fools Rush In” could be the motto of Gigi’s life while in her 40’s. How strange that one day she didn’t know that HE existed, and then suddenly there he was in her life, and she didn’t know what she’d ever done without him. Or what she would do without him once he left… Because unfortunately, she always had to lose him, and then learn how to be without him, how to bounce back, how to dry her tears, and try her hardest to believe that the next man she loved would be the one who’d stay. Each time it got harder and harder to do, and she lost a little bit more of her faith and trust.

HE: David, the famous David. Christopher. And then the Mr. Browns, one after the other, first Niles and then Oscar. How funny to date two men with the same last name, one after the other (and then to meet a third one with that same last name right after that, while on vacation: her sailor, not mentioned for another chapter or so). Her four might-have-beens, hers but for the cruel destiny that came between them. Hers not to reason why, hers but to love and lose. I say hers, although they weren’t really hers. Only two of them ever mentioned love, and one almost certainly lied about it. David told Gigi that he was falling in love with her on their first night together. Yet that love seemed to vanish as quickly as it came to him. Niles actually told her that he loved her. But his disappearance from her life without a word, turned that into a lie. The other two never fell in love with her, even though they had so much in common, got along so well, and clicked from the minute they met and kissed, funnily enough, both in a parking lot after that very first date. It was different with each of them. Different in the level of emotions and the duration of the relationship.

• David: on and off for five months
• Christopher: a month of emails and phone calls, together for just for one night
• Niles: one month
• Oscar: two months

Of the four, Gigi had only fallen in love with David. After him, she was not as quick to open her heart. She was close, oh so close, to falling in love with Oscar, and then he left, after just one week, the way David had done. Oscar came back, just days later, and she ended up in his arms again, but it wasn’t the same anymore. Gigi had closed up her heart, scared that he‘d just leave once more. She’d gone back to him because she missed his friendship, and somehow that was all there seemed to be between them from then on. For a while it was a friendship “with benefits“, and then it reverted to just friendship. Not that she regrets any of it, because of all the four, he is the one who brought the most important thing back into her life: writing. It was because of him that Gigi began to write her memoirs. Writing her memoirs gave Gigi not just closure, but clarity into all that she had done wrong, and what she wanted to change in the future, if she was ever brave enough to start dating again. She was still totally against dating, and in the meantime she had her stories and her fans and that kept her going.

With all four men, it was almost love. In those two years of online dating, Gigi only found four men who could have been THE one. Maybe at times it was just wishful thinking, and she gave her heart, and affection, and almost love away too quickly and too easily. Yet these four men touched her heart in different ways. They had a huge impact in her life, creating a profound change in the way she felt about herself, about life, about love. Four men who had all the qualities that she was looking for, and yes, each man made her break out in goose bumps galore. She only was sexually intimate with three of them… “Sexually intimate”: how hard it can be at times to describe the sexual act between two people involved in a relationship.

• “Made love” implies there was love between them, and the word “love” might not even have arisen.
• “Slept with them” didn’t always work, because sometimes there was no sleeping involved.
• “Had sex with them” made it seem too casual and ordinary, and with those three men it was definitely not casual or ordinary.
• And the four-letter word was just too crude to be used to describe what had transpired with anyone Gigi had ever really cared for, even if at times they might have used that word, just for the thrill of talking dirty.

With all four men, the gods of love were cruel. David and Christopher were just recently divorced, from horrible, nasty divorces and had ex’s who could still tear them in two, with children sadly in the thick of things. Oscar and Niles were in the process of divorce when they met. Oscar was soon divorced, but the other… who knows if the divorce was really in the makings. Divorce… just as fatal to Gigi as online dating. Divorce seemed to tear some people up so badly, that they were too damaged to ever fall in love again. It seems that not everyone can have as amicable a divorce as Gigi had had. Nor are most divorced couples able to stay on friendly terms afterwards, the way Gigi and Tim are able to do.

Niles was an outright liar or maybe simply a coward who ran far away without ever even saying goodbye, and probably never deserved Gigi’s almost love. Oscar ended up becoming a very good friend, with the potential to be probably the closest male friend she’d ever had. They were soon able to discuss each other’s dates with other people without feeling any jealousy or awkwardness, giving each other advice, and offering a shoulder in person, or an ear on the phone when needed, By the time she met these last two men, she was so afraid of being hurt that she never truly opened up her heart to them. So when it didn’t work out, she wasn’t completely heart broken, just heart-sore, heart-weary, heart-I-just-give-up.

Christopher was just one wonderful night of could-have-beens, and was most probably just a fantasy that was never real, one that was based on the romantic storybook emails they sent each other before meeting. He had had such potential, but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. Only one of them, David, the first of these four men, broke her heart, into such small pieces that just the sound of his name, a glimpse of his photo (still on her Iphone because Gigi is a glutton for punishment and torturing herself), and she could feel the tears gather and the ache return. Does one ever get over a perfect almost love? Knowing that he had everything you wanted, and yet you couldn’t hold on to him? It sometimes hurt just thinking that he had meant so much more to her than she had ever meant to him. David never had trouble moving on and forgetting Gigi. He was perfectly fine just being friends. So why was it so hard for Gigi?

Oh Gigi, would she never learn? Why couldn’t she have met them years after their divorces when hopefully things could have worked out? Why couldn’t she have met them when they were healed from their divorces, and able to make a serious attempt at a relationship? Whenever Gigi met these men, amidst the terrors and horrors of online dating, she’d thank God that they existed. Yet all too soon after, she’d revert to curses that she had been shown a glimpse of true happiness, only to have it all taken away. Sadly, most men in their forties who are free to date, are divorced and wounded. Men in their twenties and thirties do not want to settle down with just one woman. So Gigi was quite simply screwed, and not in a good way.

Two of these men, Christopher and Oscar, had the amazing talent of writing so beautifully, it made her sigh with pure joy. Two of them, David and Oscar, challenged her mind and brought new facets into her life. Meditation. Writing. Exploring herself and why she did the things she did, why she made the mistakes she’d made. Asking herself what had she done wrong in her life in regards to her relationships with men, with her marriage, with her long distance relationship, with the year of dating before she turned to the computer. They brought out a depth to herself that had never existed, and for this reason alone, Gigi was glad to have had them in her life, no matter the hurt, no matter the risk it took to give their love a chance.

Christopher was the shortest in duration of the four experiences, and therefore, probably was just an illusion all along. Gigi met Christopher on match.com. He was the passionate poetic rogue to her wild gypsy princess. He wrote the most beautiful emails, in an old-fashioned way, courting her the way knights used to court princesses, using knightly vocabulary, and weaving dreams and fantasies into each one, of him slaying dragons and charging to her rescue on a white horse. It might have sounded utterly foolish to anyone else, but Gigi lapped it up, and wrote back in the same style, the imprisoned gypsy princess to her roving troubadour knight.

Yet from the very beginning, it was ephemeral, a wisp of a dream, a short, unlived fantasy that was not meant to be, and an unfulfilled promise that would never come true. He flew into her life and flitted away almost as soon as he entered it. He barely touched her heart, just danced across the very edges of it, and she shed not a tear for him when he left. Yet the memory of dancing with him in that parking lot, under a moonlit sky will live in her memories forever, and will make her smile even as an old woman some day no matter how many years have gone by. She will save the missives he wrote to her of a passionate rogue rescuing a lonely gypsy princess forever tucked away, not in a diary with the petals of the orchids he gave her on the one and only day they met (was it only once, she suddenly amazingly realizes?). She will save them not in her iPhone diary, since she was never able to write about the perfection of that one magical night, but in the complex files of her computer, in the emails they wrote before they met.

Those stories that he invented had so touched her heart that she had almost been ready to let down her Rapunzel hair, so he that he could climb up and rescue her from the lonely tower she had barricaded herself into. She had almost lowered the drawbridge down of the castle she’d locked herself into since the DOD (the days of David). They had one short magical night together, in which all they did was kiss, and then he ran away, telling her that he wasn’t ready, that too much was going on in his life: fighting his ex for custody of his three daughters, scared that he was about to lose his job and his home, aware that he had not dated another woman since he met his ex in high school. He left and apart from a few online encounters, he soon disappeared, so totally that even his profile was removed, and soon his phone number was disconnected, and it was as if he’d never even existed. If it wasn’t for those beautiful fanciful tales she had saved about that prince rescuing the princess, she would have thought him a beautiful figment of her imagination.

That date with Christopher had been magical though, from the moment he showed up with orchids for her, to the last kiss before they separated for good. They had dinner at a small Cuban restaurant, and they stayed and talked until they were kicked out. They then moved up the street to a pool bar, and talked the night away, until they were once again kicked out. They found that they had so much in common, from movies and music, to past experiences. From the bar they moved to the parking lot, (where no one was around to kick them out), and neither one wanted to go home, even though it was 2 AM on a Tuesday, and they both had to work the next day. Gigi put on some music in her car, rolled down the windows, and Christopher simply extended his hand to her. She accepted it with a smile, and just like he’d written in an email, they danced under the stars and howled at the moon. Gigi fit right into his arms, and the kisses exchanged were sweet, with a deep passion barely concealed, but kept in check by both sides. They kissed and danced for over an hour, in a deserted parking lot, on a beautiful star-lit night, and they never again met in person. They emailed and called for a few weeks, but then he told her that he needed time. Time to get his life in order. Then WHY were you on match.com, Gigi wanted to scream, but didn’t?

Christopher felt the need to explain his need for space. He had just gotten divorced, and had three daughters, and an ex-wife from hell. She was fighting him over the custody he currently had. Her poor mothering skills had made the judge grant him custody. His eldest daughter was 16, and she refused to go anywhere near her mother, and the judge had allowed her the right to choose. However, the two youngest ones had no choice, being only 12 and 7 years old, and it killed Christopher to be forced to make them go to stay with their mother, whom he simply could not bring himself to trust to watch over his precious princesses, as he called them.

He was first and foremost a father, and therein lay the problem. When he had his daughters, he had no time to meet Gigi, which was why it was over a month from the first email to their one and only date. And when his daughters were with their mother, he was too upset to meet. He was not ready to let a woman into his life and add on the role of boyfriend. Not to mention the money problems that the custody battle was bringing him, or the fact that his job was in danger of being cut. He was just another perfect man that Gigi met at the wrong time. And at times like these, Gigi felt like cursing in various languages… Why meet someone like this, and be shown a glimpse of future happiness, only to see it all flutter away like wisps of smoke from a campfire. You can look up and see the wisps being carried far away, until they are no more, and are completely out of sight, never to be seen again, almost as though they were never there.

Now David has been mentioned a lot, and even had two chapters dedicated completely to him. Little do my readers know that shortly, in fact just days later, after writing about him Gigi actually called David. I know. You are thinking she was crazy to call someone who hurt her so badly, who was almost toxic to her. Yet in one day, she had three separate “signs of David.” First she received a chat invite from a stranger called David. Then she had a hankering for sun flower seeds and stopped to get some at a store, and found the brand name of the sun flower seeds was David. And then as she was driving around, looking for a specific restaurant, and looking at street sign names, she saw a street named David. Gigi believed in signs, and here were three, all in one day.

So she called David, and told him that she had been writing her memoirs, had written about him, and that she thought they could now be friends. David must have been intrigued by the possibility, because he agreed to meet her and go see a movie together. Now of course, Gigi was nervous when the day came, as she wondered how it would feel to see him again, after more than a year and a half. Well, it wasn’t quite what she’d hoped for and dreamed about for so long. There was no magical moment like the night they first met. David didn’t wrap her up in his arms and declare that losing her had been the biggest mistake of his life. Yet Gigi was not torn in two at seeing him. She didn’t feel tears rush into her eyes at the thought of never being together they way they once were.

Writing about her Gigi memoirs had given her a lot of the closure she’d needed back then, and had never received. It had helped her get over him and finally move on and accept that it was over, and maybe had never even been all that she’d thought it was. She didn’t burst into instantaneous goose bumps when they hugged, nor did she feel like pushing him down onto her couch and picking up where they had left off the last time they sat on that very same (red of course) couch in her living room. No. Gigi was able to abstain, and they had a very pleasant evening, talking, going to a movie, and talking some more after that. He told her that he had read both of the chapters that she’d written about him. He said that he had even read all of her chapters, and that for a man who didn’t read that kind of material, it must have something good about it to hold his interest. He did admit that it was kind of strange to read all that had transpired between them, and seeing it all through Gigi’s point of view.

Gigi didn’t ask him if it had made him relive it all and miss her at least just a little. The old Gigi would have asked him. The new Gigi didn’t chase men anymore, or try and find out how they felt about her. Gigi had gained confidence through writing her memoirs. Confidence and clarity and closure. For the first time in her life, she was happy without a man in her life. I think it was a combination of frustration and disappointment of all the failed attempts. She was quite simply tired of the whole song and dance. Of believing in someone only to be let down.

David was still dating the woman from Colorado, though it was a long-distance relationship, and he only saw her every couple of months. Their second get together (I can’t call them dates, since that is not what they were), was just as fun, as they saw another movie, and did more talking. David asked Gigi if she was comfortable with just being friends, making sure she knew that it would only be friendship. He didn’t want her to get the wrong impression, or get her hopes up. Strangely enough, Gigi had no hopes. She knew that she was probably the only one who would want to give it another try. And since David didn’t seem to be in the least bit inclined to head off in that direction, she found that she was content to remain friends. They were soon talking to each other on the phone about once a week or so, sometimes every other week, and David did a lot of the calling.

The last few conversations that Gigi had with David were when he told her that he ended his long-distance relationship. Gigi had one small moment of “maybe it’s finally time for us to try again” before he told her that he had gone on a very successful blind date, and had seen the woman every single day for a week. Gigi thought it was funny that she was now warning him to be careful, because that exact thing had happened to them too. David told her that he was a different man now, at a different point of his life. Then he called Gigi one night at midnight when she was out with a girl friend, and told her that he was slowing things down with this new woman, not wanting to rush into anything. Another time David asked her once if she had hopes of getting back together with him, and Gigi was honest. She told him that she probably would give it another chance to see if it could work out this time, but that she would never be the one to ask him if he would ever want that too. Gigi truly had no idea what was in David’s head, or how he felt about her now. She only knew that she was fine without him, and that she could be happy without him, and that she no longer dreamed about being with him again. Gigi was content to place her future happiness, not in the hands of computers and men, but in destiny, fate, and karma, and that she would accept, hopefully with dignity whatever it brought her way.

As for her three Mr. Brown’s, Gigi felt that they deserved a chapter of their own, maybe the next one, maybe not. At times Gigi tried to write her chapters in a certain chronological order. At times, an idea or memory would fly into her head and would take over and make itself the next chapter. All Gigi knew was that with each chapter written, a little of her past hurt left her heart, maybe freeing her for a better and happier tomorrow.

To read Part XVIII, see The Adventures of a Thoroughly Confused Gigi – Part XVIII