Every Life Deserves a Great Love

I am just beginning to read Patti Smith's Just Kids, the romantic, lyrical story of her great romance and creative connection with Robert Mapplethorpe in the days before either became famous.

It is a poetic paean to self-discovery and to searching, to friendship, to selflessness and to the various forms that art and love may take. Unlike the harsh tones that sometimes jar with the poetry of Smith's music, or the shocking photographs that defined Mapplethorpe's later life, their early days and fledgling love story was about what love could bring to art and vice versa. About what the sacrifice of one partner meant to the creative work of the other.

What struck me as I read was the thing that we all really know: that everyone deserves a great love.

I remembered crying uncontrollably when I saw the film, the English Patient. When I was a graduate student, there with a man I knew would break my heart, though even he did not know it at the time. Because I am rather stoic, he was confused, not just that I was crying, but that my tears so clearly went beyond the scope of the film. They began when Carravagio, the English Patient, risked his life to save the woman he loved. And though she died, his devotion to his promise that he would return to bring her out of a precarious situation where her plane had gone down in a desert moved me tremendously. Every woman wants a man who will live out some stereotyped fantasy for her. I had no idea that I wanted a man who would cross the burning sands to save me. The film and this boyfriend made that reality startlingly clear. I was sitting with someone who loved me but whom I knew did not know that he could not commit to the depth of, not just the intensity of the necessary emotion, but many lesser feelings as well. I felt trapped by need and fooled by him. Because people tell you who they are when you meet them. And I had met someone gallant. Somewhere midstream he had taken off his top hat, put on a baseball cap and turned it around.

Reading Just Kids, I have also had lovely memories of Dennis. He was a dear man who, much like Patty's early Robert, supported what I needed. We did that for each other. When I was suffering the miseries of studying for the New York State psychology licensing exam, the hardest in the nation, he spent the weekends with me. While I slogged away at theory, clinical practice and law, he read. He would look up and smile, remind me to take a break, bring me flowering jasmine tea. Unwilling to poison me with his cooking, he always went to a wonderful set of restaurants in the West Village that prepared my favorite foods. He then arranged these treats on my china. Lunch or dinner was served with glorious music - often Mahler. Anything to make my grueling task easier.

Because it is true. We all deserve a great, heart-rending, soul-embracing , walk across the burning sands, until the ends of time, selfless, endless love. Such love provides the friendship safety and comfort that allows us to be our whole, vulnerable, creative, productive and crazy selves. It allows us to reciprocate the same. It gives us a place to call home.

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