Most of the email I get from readers here is asking for advice, so this was very different.
Amy was very direct. She told me she had started reading my articles a couple of years ago when her marriage was falling apart. She’s 28 now and divorced from a man she said was a terrible choice for her.
As she continued reading what I write — about love and life and my own needs — she started wondering if she and I might be interested in each other.
“I know this is very presumptuous,” she wrote, “but when I read about what you want in a wife and a family, I keep thinking we want the same things. But you’ve made it obvious you still hold love for someone from your past. I don’t know if you’re willing to find someone else yet, so I thought I’d ask.”
Amy had a number of interesting and insightful questions. With her permission, I’m sharing some of our correspondence with you.
Narcissists set themselves up for miserable lives and lonely deaths
Cycles keep us circling through life until we get something right
There’s hatred, evil and injustice, but this is the ‘real’ America, too
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone