Santa Cruz Sentinel

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Some folks search for love all their lives and never find it. Some run into love in their teens and others when they’re 70.

Some strike it rich with their first love and others on their second marriage expedition. For me, it was the third time around that was the lucky charm.

The younger my age, the more certain I had been about the mystery of relationships. I thought I was wise to love’s ways. I believed when we fell in love we just knew it. If it didn’t work out, then it wasn’t meant to be.

Such was the awe-inspiring depths of my young perceptions.

As I’ve aged and traveled the many roads of partnership with the opposite sex, my previous certainties and simplification have been blown away by the winds of experience.

When I was a teenager, I used to think I knew everything about love and what love means. Now I know that I know very little, if anything at all.

Why do some relationships and people work together like two good actors on a stage, while others forget their lines, make the wrong entrance or are overwhelmed by the other’s personality or performance?

Why do some folks stay together a lifetime and others less than a year, a month or a week?

There are some obvious considerations. If people are attracted to each other physically, able to communicate clearly and respect one another as complete, changing human beings, I would bet their relationship has a better chance of succeeding than those who lack these mutual attributes.

Then again, I’ve met people who never listened to one another and have little understanding of their partner, yet continue to live together for many years, with genuine contentment and joy. There are some human needs and agreements, spoken or unspoken, that the other person must fulfill in these arrangements.

On the other ring finger, I’ve met people who had all the qualities I’d expect in a good marriage, yet they called it quits after a couple of years.

When I was 18 I met Cindy, who was 16. I thought I had found true love and gone to heaven.

The day we met we decided to move in together, and two weeks later, with the permission of her mother, we did.

Our love, lust and attention were all consuming. I would do anything to make her happy, thus denying my own desires and dreams and leaving her with all the decisions about how we would live and what we would do.

Our plans for the future were very different, but I was blind to such realities and let my body rule my heart.

When Cindy turned 18 and I was 20, we married. Neither of us took it seriously (well, maybe I did at the time). We thought it was a great excuse for a big party.

A year after our marriage, we divorced. She had done everything possible to get me angry, to make me stand up for myself — but I was lost in the poppy field of love and couldn’t get back home to my true self.

After a number of years and a couple of other interesting relationships, I met Pat. This time the roles were reversed, and I found she would do everything I wanted to do, at least in the beginning.

We were both involved in volunteer work, both wanted children (and always had) and seemed to have similar goals and aspirations. I thought our agreements and her acquiescence were love.

Pat and I were married and had two beautiful children. Then the realities I had ignored began to reveal themselves.

We started arguing about everything and anything. A lot of what she said or did had not been out of her desire but because she knew it was what I wanted to hear.

Food, work, adoption, school — everything was in conflict. After eight years I came to my senses and we divorced.

It was painful and difficult but necessary. In addition to learning a lot about how to live with someone (or how not to), our relationship blessed us with the children we had both longed for.

Not long after our divorce, I met Audrey. We’ve now been together 13 years, married for 11. We were pulled together like magnets.

We seem to have all the ingredients for a magical partnership: love, respect, honesty, communication, desire, admiration and support.

But all the right ingredients don’t always make a good dish.

We’ve been through some painful, difficult times, but haven’t flinched. We have no doubts about our marriage. But to tell you the truth, I don’t know why.

Why are we going to live together happily until one of us dies? Why do we feel the way we do about one another? Why do we feel so comfortable and at ease with the others presence? Why am I still so in love with her after all these years?

Maybe it’s all about the unique scents we secrete to attract mates. Yeah, that explains everything: pheromones and circumstance.

I think the next time someone asks me how we know when we’re in love, I’ll tell them it all comes down to the nose: the nose, the stars, the planets, knowing yourself and a little luck.

Gabriel Constans is a Santa Cruz writer, author of "Beyond One’s Own: Healing Humanity in the Wake of Personal Tragedy."

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