I Miss You Most on Saturdays

“I’ve always thought of you as being so lucky in love. You’ve had relationships with men who loved you deeply…”

So said my best friend since fifth grade, who is like a sister to me. She recently divorced and, for the first time in her 40 years, is experiencing a love like she has always deserved, and has witnessed me having.

It got me thinking about the men I’ve loved and who loved me back.

I’ve had six significant relationships with men that left indelible impressions and influence me to this day; men who genuinely loved me for just me, and I loved them absolutely in return, each one giving me something I needed to learn at the time.

My first serious romantic relationship was a positive one for me. He was smart, I think he got a perfect score on his SAT’s, star of the Lacrosse team and every other sport he tried, he was great to me, treated me well, taught me about life and love and great music and great movies, he was extremely good looking, and truly in love with me. It was the sweetest way to enter into adulthood from puberty with love and respect.

For me, though, it was puppy love. I knew something integral was missing in our relationship.

Whatever that something was, it walked into my life shortly afterward; my world altered irrevocably. It wasn’t love at first sight but rather love at first…feel.

He was the last student to walk — actually, it was more like a saunter — into the school chapel as if he didn’t have a care in the world. The place was abuzz with students, the air infused with the excited energy of settling into the second semester after a long winter break. Chatter filled the packed room and echoed off the walls: students talking to friends about their holidays and how they had filled their days off from school.

This was my first day.

I had transferred from another school and was starting mid-way through the year. I was nervous and painfully shy. Then he entered.

His aura of complete composure over himself was in direct contrast to his slipshod appearance. The wrinkled white oxford shirt he wore only emphasized the jet-blackness of the mop of hair tousled atop his head; half his shirt tucked in and the other half hanging haphazardly out, he looked like he rolled out of bed five minutes prior to the school bell ringing.

Despite his disorganized attire and grooming, he was handsome with dark sunken eyes, an olive complexion and a command of the room that left me thunderstruck. I had never seen or felt anything like him. His gaze found its way directly towards me; as if he and I were the only two people that mattered. My nerves melted away and a stillness overtook me, silencing the din in the chapel.

It’s as if our souls said “Hi” from across the room. “You are familiar. I understand you.”

Our connection was born.

So this is what it feels like. This feels like the first day of my life.

His moxie permeated the chapel and made everyone else pale in comparison. I watched him confidently amble his way down the aisle, say hi to friends, and finally take a seat on one of the wooden benches across the aisle from where I sat, but only when he was good and ready.

He had a mischievous grin on his face, and most of the energy in the room landed where he now sat. He was talking unabashedly and making his friends laugh, but I recognized the sadness behind his eyes. There was something hidden in those dark eyes that even his self-assured verve couldn’t conceal. There was a loneliness there, a disappointment, a longing for something.

It was a good 20 plus years ago and I remember that day like it was yesterday, and everything I loved about him stays with me.

It didn’t take long for us to get together and realize our pairing offered something positive to the other, forging one of the most intimate friendships I’ve experienced.

His unrestrained free-spirited attitude toward the world was in direct contrast to the uptight view of my world, which at the time was ruled by order and discipline, like doing my homework the minute I got home from school and studying relentlessly for exams to ensure dominance over all my school subjects.

I was sheltered and rarely out of my parent’s sight; he was sent to boarding school and on his own at the age of fourteen. I got off on making daily checklists and acing tests and school supplies and good grades. He got off on drugs, the Grateful Dead and pushing the buttons of every teacher he came across, including the headmaster.

While I was trying to go as unnoticed as possible because I’m reserved and extremely reticent, he was busy playing the class clown and relished in making people laugh while unnerving them at the same time. He nearly got kicked out of school several times for breaking rules while I was trying to be the perfect student and daughter for my strict father (male relationship number one).

In short, I followed the rules. He broke them.

The effect of our partnership was, at the very least, sexy and at best, a perfect match.

Our connection had an unexpected compatibility about it that was instantly noticeable. We simply understood each other the moment we met, immediately in a world of two. The chemistry between us was undeniable to anyone we allowed to share our orbit.

While our personalities were in direct contrast from an outside perspective, our outlook on life was very much the same: upbeat, positive and fun.

We had similar tastes, interests, and ideas about the world. He and I wanted the same things but how we went about achieving those things, and how we dealt with people, could not have been more different.

However, similar our sensibilities were, he was brazen and extroverted while I was quietly controlled. I can be quite dynamic and overconfident sometimes in areas when I know the topic of discussion well, but mostly I’m an observer of life. I sit back quietly and take mental notes of the goings-on around me. People rarely know what I’m thinking, but you will know if I like you or not.

He was mostly the observed and commanded any room he occupied by the sheer force of his personality. I loved how he felt comfortable in the spotlight. This was just fine with me because I shied away from the spotlight. He let his guard down when it was just the two of us, where he could be quiet and introspective, but in a room full of people he was at its center.

We were both extremely practical with enough common sense between us for at least twenty people, and we each possessed an independent streak and a strong sense of self, a deep knowing of who we were, unusual for the age we found ourselves at the time…teenagers.

He tapped into the rebellious part of me that I kept well hidden. I would eventually break the rules, mostly my father’s, but I was too vigilant and clever to get caught.

Although we were both extremely stubborn with strong personalities, we would bend and compromise for the other with little effort. His character and his love for me, coupled with his protectiveness of me, brought to the forefront the soft, feminine aspect of my nature; the feature of my personality I like the most. We rarely argued. The only disagreement I recall was over a song.

A song that I could not believe he liked.

The song in question was “Love The One You’re With” by Stephen Stills. I took it as a personal affront to our love that he would think the message of this song was okay, or that he would even like its melody. This is how rigid and absolute I was in my ideals regarding love at an early age, and how seriously I took our connection. He got a perverse kick from my outrage and continued to sing it to me a cappella just to tease me, and to elicit a smile from me, which he would eventually get, and he wouldn’t give up until he had. The disagreement ended with me laughing at his playfulness, and at his tone-deaf voice, and him pulling me into his arms for a big bear hug.

I still don’t like that song, although now I smile when I hear it.

We both had self-awareness and strong survival instincts and quietly hoped for the best out of life. Our alliance made it easier to navigate the world of demanding, critical parents, school and the expectations that came with being a teenager in upper middle-class families in the flawed 1980’s when cocaine was the drug of choice, and easily accessible at boarding school.

I survived my dysfunctional family life — my father and his unpredictable rage — by taking care of myself in typical teenage fashion: locking myself in my room for hours at a time, writing, reading and listening to music, or hanging with a few select friends.

I laid down the law for him and demanded he quit some of his dangerous extracurricular activities that nearly got him kicked out of school, like hardcore drugs, or he couldn’t be with me. Period. He complied with my demand because he loved me, and he also knew how to survive.

He desperately wanted to get through high school and he wisely knew spending as much time with me would help him accomplish this goal. His drug use was quickly becoming a dangerous habit, consuming alcohol and cocaine to numb the pain that had no other outlet, but was the reason he was teetering on being kicked out of school for good.

Not emotionally equipped or experienced to deal with such issues, the only thing I knew to do was to double down on my love for him, which was easy, and set boundaries. He pulled through boarding school and got what he needed by attaching himself to me, someone who saw his worth immediately and gave him the love he was missing elsewhere, yet so deserved.

I don’t know what attracted me to him more; his love for me, which was given easily and reliably, or his survival instincts, and how adept he was at fending for himself, which I strongly identified with. His rebellious attitude and refusal to comply with rules made by the adults who had let him down triggered an instinct in me to fiercely protect him and fortify him with my love.

We took most of our classes together. He’d sit right by my side while I ate up class — I loved learning — taking meticulous notes, while he doodled on his notebooks, and wrote down lyrics to Dead songs. He gradually stopped daring teachers to kick him out of class with his smart-ass comments and became more serious about school. I thought he was unfairly targeted by teachers who were expecting him to fail, and when someone criticized him, they may as well been criticizing me. I was so in tune with him, acutely aware of his feelings which he rarely revealed. In turn, he was extremely protective of me.

We needed each other.

I understood exactly where his attitude towards adults came from, due to living the last 16 years with my overbearing, intolerant, authoritative father who was a strict disciplinarian. Along with my self-imposed need to do well, I felt a lot of pressure to perform perfectly, exacerbated by the fact that I’m a lot like my father in his perseverance and determination.

My oldest sister didn’t take well to academics, so I had to be successful in that area. My father made it extremely obvious how much of a disappointment she had been to him regarding her average grades in school, and her ambivalence about going to college. It didn’t help that my parents had my IQ tested; it was found to be quite high. We were told I had a high “aptitude for learning.” This only added to the expectation that I succeed.

Most of my adolescence I felt like I was in the role of the eldest child, and not the second. Not a part I wanted to play, it made me feel guilty and bad for my older sister like I was being put in an awkward position by my parents. My father’s cruel dismissal of her made everyone in our house feel bad and made me want to rebel against him. My mother would rarely stand up to my father, and his anger. I was the only one of my siblings who talked back to my father, talked to him the way he talked to us, and I paid for it.

My father’s love for me would only be given if I continued making excellent grades, and only completely given if I was a financial success after college, a dividend on how much money he spent on my expensive private school education. To my father, success equates to high earning capacity. The more money you make, the more worthy you are to breath air in his world.

When this boyfriend came along, he became the strong male figure in my life — he showed me that I alone am enough. I replaced my father’s opinion with his, the one person who saw me as I see myself, just as I am. Notably, he was the first friend I brought into my parent’s house who displayed absolutely no signs of being intimidated by my father. The first. AHHH. Yes. Please stay by my side forever.

My mother and younger siblings were also very fond of him, and because he was at my house most of our after school hours and weekends, he was an adopted member of our crazy family, the mood in the room lightened by his participation and presence. His role included occasionally making dinner for my mom (he made an excellent stir-fry — she loved how he would cook dinner), and also to provide comic relief to ease the palpable tension when my dad walked through the door full of rage. I craved every inch of him for the way he handled my family and made life more bearable for me.

We enjoyed the company of the other immensely, and he was able to draw from me my most positive self, and this effect lasted the entire time we were together, through high school, and most of college.

He didn’t think he was smart, but I knew he was because he matched wits with me easily. Even though he did not aim for academic success, his grades a reflection of his spite for school and adults and the authority they yielded, I saw his worth from our first conversation. His intelligence and humor kept me on my toes, which I relished. The fact that he was secure with who he was, and not intimidated by my smarts attracted me to him even more.

His emotionally absent parents left him feeling abandoned, and prompted a desire in me to take care of him, and meet his needs. I didn’t know I had this ability to love someone so fervently, and selflessly until our paths crossed.

The longer we were together, the harder I fell.

One of his first jobs was pumping gas in the small town where he grew up. This “opportunity” was probably one experience that allowed him to hone his quick ability to size up people so accurately, something my sheltered existence didn’t afford me.

One chilly fall day, I insisted on going with him to work. I didn’t want to be stuck at his parent’s house, and being with him was where I wanted to be — even if this meant I had to pump gas. Staying with him was against “gas station policy”, so he gave me money to go shopping at the boutiques that lined the main street of this quaint, quiet New England town.

Instead of buying something for myself with the money he gave me, I brought him back a gift: a beautifully crafted small wooden box made by hand. Tears welled in his eyes when I handed it to him. I knew then I never wanted to be separated from this sweet soul who rarely revealed the deep emotional well he kept hidden.

This was only one of many moments when his sensitivity and depth of feeling would catch me off guard and move me completely and unexpectedly.

He was my safe place. I was in love with every part of him.

He never bored me…ever. As men have. He didn’t make me nervous either; he had a calm-inducing effect on me, like a comfortable worn in shoe I could never part with because it fit me so well from the first moment. Although, when we were apart for any length of time, he did have the effect of making my heart skip a beat when he entered a room. In nearly every photo of us, we are grasping onto each other, and I’m usually on his lap, my small hands ardently clutching a part of him with intent. I found where I belonged, right by his side.

We had a shorthand between us, even a look would communicate what the other was thinking or about to say. A friend said, “You were in a bubble of two.” The only way I can describe it is it was like being alone with myself, but with someone else funnier than me, who got me right away. Uncomplicated and effortless and unguarded, the two of us together created an extremely private domain.

Alone with him, in a room, was my favorite place.

This is where our closeness took us to a whole other level that is hard to explain. When the two of us were completely alone, all the good stuff between us, which was so extensive, was magnified. Being with him was like what home should feel like if you’re extremely lucky.

He was not my first sexual experience but it felt like he was the only one…like no one else need bother exist. He set every part of me aflame, and he knew how to touch me the way my body wanted to be touched without me having to say a word. Our deep connection fired on all levels and was only amplified when we were alone. Reading each other’s thoughts came naturally for both of us for whatever reason. The quietness we created together made the outside world disappear.

Because I trusted him so implicitly, and he was an equal part friend and lover, and my equal, our physical closeness quenched an emotional thirst that had never been previously filled. He so satisfied an emotional void I couldn’t name.

During college, we both did a semester abroad. I studied in Brussels while he was in The Netherlands, a short train ride away from me.

One weekend, I took a train and a bus to get to the remote Castle where he was living. The plan was to hang out with the friends he was living with, mostly guys — and girls, who I’m sure all had crushes on him — we were to go pubbing with them all night. He was waiting for me at the bus stop and as soon as he saw me step off the bus, he got that huge, genuine grin on his face he reserved only for me, and I could tell he was already thinking of a way to ditch his friends, which he eventually did.

A few weeks later we traveled through Europe. We got to experience Holland, Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia for the first time together, where my ancestry descends from my father’s side.

We didn’t reserve a hotel before we got to Prague because he liked to “wing it.” Winging it is not in my comfort zone. However, I didn’t mind winging it as long I was winging it with him. I trusted him, and our combined energy usually made everything work out. AND, HE was GREAT at winging it. I had witnessed him bullshit his way out of trouble countless times with teachers at boarding school, and I admired the skill.

Sleep-deprived after sleeping on the train –romantic and cozy but not conducive to sleeping — trying to work the payphone was challenging. First off, the instructions on the phone were in Czech; secondly, it’s the 90’s in Czechoslovakia.

Out of the blue, an elderly couple asked us if we wanted to rent their flat for the night. I was skeptical but he wanted to check it out. It turned out to be lovely, and cheap.

Next, we traveled to a small town in Austria called Bad Gastein to ski. The town was gorgeous, small and nestled at the bottom of the enormous Austrian Mountains. A storybook town. Once again we arrived at night — “winging it” — with nowhere to stay.

This time, all the hotels were full because it happened to be the week Austrians took their holiday to ski.

Extreme cold weather and my temperament do not play well together, but we trekked through the snow to the nearest hotel. We were told there was no vacancy anywhere, but the receptionist called around for us finding the last room left in the entire village.

The last room cost 900 Shillings! We didn’t usually spend that kind of money for one night. I whipped out my emergency credit card like I had saved the day and heroically said, “This constitutes as an emergency. I’ve got this!” My emergency credit card was quickly declined. It expired over a month ago. I was close to tears and tired: he started laughing and said “Don’t worry, we won’t be sleeping in the train station” and pulled out his emergency travelers checks.

He teased me about my emergency credit card for the next few days. His playfulness with me managed to put me at ease, and this was irresistible. My whole being relaxed in his company.

The hotel sat nestled at the bottom of the ski resort. Our room was large and beautiful, ornate but elegant, the way only Europeans know how to do it. It had a terrace looking onto the mountain we would ski on the next day. It was magical. I could have lived there forever with him, starting right then and there.

We promptly made love.

The snow started coming down again. It was late but we decided to have a drink downstairs at the hotel bar, the cold and snow thwarting our original plans to acquaint ourselves with this idyllic place. We each had a beer. We met a nice couple from Finland, who gave us their number straight away — in case we ever found ourselves in Finland and needed a place to stay. I practiced my French on some cute French boys, and then we decided to go back upstairs to be alone. Our favorite place.

We bathed each other in the enormous bathtub. He washed my naked body. I washed his hair. His hair was now down to his shoulders, after years of growing it, long, jet black and wavy. He laid back in my arms as I rinsed the suds from his waves. We hardly spoke but communicated effortlessly.

We fell right asleep in each other’s arms. He pulled me close to him every night we were together in our sleep, grabbing me…like he was making sure I was still there. We slept soundly when together. We were to get up at 7:00 am to ski but ignored the alarm and slept until 9:00.

After a few more days of traveling, we parted to our respective countries. I couldn’t stand leaving him. His absence left too vast a space for me to fill.

A week later he came to stay with me for the weekend in Brussels. I took him to my favorite pub where I acquired my love of Belgium beer with the friends I had met in my study abroad program.

This pub was beautiful. It was very old and cavernous-like and dimly lit. It had stood for centuries right at the heart of the town square, which was paved entirely with cobblestone and lined with pubs and cathedrals. The walls of the pub were a deep, dark forest green with delicate gold trim, the bar made from the deepest dark wood accentuating the gold and green of the walls. We sat in big comfy dark leather chairs right in front of a roaring fireplace, talking easily.

I drank a Bush beer, the Belgium Bush beer, and he a Whitbread from London. He was in a reflective mood this day at the pub when he turned to me and told me that I knew him better than anyone else knew him, and he could easily spend the rest of his life with me.

I felt the same way. I wanted at least four of his children. However, I knew he wasn’t ready. He knew it too.

Talking to each other about everything and anything constituted a big part of our relationship. Our conversations occasionally delved into deep philosophical questions about life; however the tone remained casual, I think because we agreed on so many things, and saw ourselves on the same side in life. Usually, we talked about the mundane aspects of everyday life. There was no texting back then, so we would spend hours on the phone at night when we were in separate places. Even after we broke up and he was seeing someone else, I’d get frequent calls, sometimes at 2:00 am, sometimes twice in one night, when he couldn’t sleep, and we’d talk for hours. We were a sounding board for each other; a non-judgmental mirror exposing our truest selves.

One long conversation was spent talking about not fitting into college, and feeling out of place. During his first year of college, he was seriously questioning whether to drop out of school. I was having similar feelings about college. By the end of the conversation, my tone had turned from empathic to one of tough love, and I told him there was no way he was dropping out of school.

Even though he was only a 45-minute bus ride away, we missed each other terribly. We would take weekend trips to Vermont to ski, and go hiking in New Hampshire, but it wasn’t the same as seeing each other every day. We were incredibly good friends first. He didn’t like to read or write, and yet, he wrote me love letters when we had to be apart that were signed, “Your friend always, I love you so much.”

My reaction to his love was to give back to him tenfold. He was the family I always wanted, he genuinely wanted the best for me, and my best self showed up for him. I anticipated his needs and he mine.

We had a tremendous amount of mutual respect and true affection, and I trusted his judgment as much as my own. This was new for me.

I have never been one to put much weight in what other people think about me, good or bad, including the opinions of my family. If I have a problem and ask for help from friends and family, I’ll listen to what they have to offer, and then rarely take anyone’s advice. I nearly always go with my own judgment and my first instinct because I know myself so well. I have been this way since I was little, infuriating to members of my family. But his opinion actually carried weight with me.

I don’t know how to explain it, true love, perhaps. Poets, scholars, philosophers have been trying to explain love for centuries, and no one has adequately done so. So I won’t try to explain it here.

The only explanation that has ever made any sense to me, although, it sounds a bit out there and hippy-ish, was from an older gentlemen in his 60’s who has seen everything and experienced more, he said to me “You and he probably vibrate on the same frequency, when you meet someone like that, and you genuinely have a mutual caring and deep understanding for the other, then you elevate each other when you are in the same room, and it feels like…magic.”

Yes. That is exactly what it felt like. Magic.

This makes sense to me because the only thing I know for sure is that everything is energy. I’m in good company, Albert Einstein wrote frequently about energy and its properties. Like really does attract like. I believe this with every part of me. I have experienced it many times, especially in the past several years when I have been most content with life. What could create more positive energy and attraction than two young people in love, and in sync, rooting for their partner and friend?

Two positive forces elevate the other with genuine trust and care — a sweet alliance. Simply put, we were on the same wavelength and had the ability to read each other accurately.

Neither of us took that love for granted. Even though we had a lot of friends, separate and together, we both wisely knew — and this was beyond what our years should have allowed us to understand — we both instinctively knew to keep every aspect of our relationship private, like we didn’t want to share what we had found, a small club of two, no other members need apply.

If he and I were still together I wouldn’t be writing this, I would be telling him how much I love him privately.

Anais Nin wisely said, “Do not seek the because — in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”

In my youth, I desperately wanted to know the truth of everything, everything that mattered to me anyway. I wanted to get to the core of whatever it was my analytical brain was trying to dissect. I needed a reason, an explanation and it had to be the absolute truth.

But when it comes to love, you can’t put it in a box or explain it away. I wish I had known this when I was younger. I was born with a rational temperament, only reinforced by my straightforward thinking father. Sometimes I think I have way too much common sense and rely too heavily on my head and not enough on my heart.

When I was in my 20’s I rarely thought about intuition or followed my heart. If I had followed my heart, maybe this man and I would have stayed together. I won’t ever know.

Because I was so young, this love scared me. It was extremely intimate and I knew I couldn’t bear losing him. We were too young to stay together — that is what I naively thought then, and told myself. To cause myself as little pain as possible, I broke up with him. I thought I wasn’t enough for him and he would find that out one day and leave me. The pain of that would be too great to bear.

My need to control life, along with my then adolescent belief that life can be controlled and pain mitigated, prompted me to end our relationship to ensure I would not ever have to face the kind of hurt from him leaving me, which I would not survive.

It turns out the pain is still the same, worse actually because I hurt him. My biggest regret is that I hurt him. I let him down, and in the process, I lost his trust. The pain of losing someone so special is exactly in proportion to the size of the love. The pain of losing him as a partner and a friend was unimaginable.

I stupidly believed that his love for me would not last. Now, I believe surely it would have.

What I recognized in his dark eyes the day he so confidently walked into the chapel and into my life, was his deep-seated affliction of loneliness and isolation that matched mine. The feeling of being isolated within our families, and a sense of not belonging until we met each other and felt seen and accepted. The kind of loneliness you have even when you are surrounded by people, you can’t name or place it, until you meet someone who cures that hurt in you because they understand and see something in you that no one else has access to.

Our deep connection, which only strengthened over time, extinguished the loneliness we were both carrying before we met.

There was a running theme in our five-year relationship that continued after we broke up and he was seeing someone else; we were both adamant about always being in each other’s lives. This didn’t end up happening because it was too painful to have one small part of each other without the rest…after having experienced each other so fully, and loving what the combination of the two of us felt like, and the energy it created. But I know why we both held on so tightly to the notion that we needed the other.

My friend is right. I have been lucky in love.

Now that I’m much older with some life experience behind me, I think it is rare to find the kind of love and relationship the two of us created. Most people don’t get to experience a deep love like we shared, with someone so compatible and who brought so much light.

I’m grateful to have had him for the short time I did — and I had all of him — his mind, his body, his heart and his soul. My walls fell when I was with him, my attempts at perfection unnecessary to obtain his love. We genuinely gave our whole selves over to the other, and in turn, we were both taken care of by the other, and we ended our time together with respect.

I am forever grateful to him for showing me my potential to love someone so completely without limitations, and for loving me so deeply in return. It is how I love my child today.

I kind of feel like I got the best part of him, at the best time, partly because I was able to elicit from him the best aspects of his personality. When we were together he’d do anything for me, and I for him.

We had a great love, only bad timing.

It’s the people and the stories we remember that define our past, give it meaning and shape our identity. And if we’re fortunate enough to meet someone who touches us deeply and satisfyingly, as he did, part of them gets etched into our souls and stays with us forever.

I still miss him sometimes, mostly on Saturdays. We spent many of our Saturdays completely alone…my favorite place with him.

Join my email list to keep in touch.

Jessica Sisak is a writer and on-line entrepreneur, and a recovering Type A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her daughter, two dogs and two cats.

Find her on Twitter @jaylsisak.