I didn’t hurt with every nerve in my body. When he was kind, which was all the time, I didn’t feel exalted out of the depths.

Or, as I would have said then, the chemistry just didn’t seem to be there.

One warm day in February this new man and I went to the beach – the same beach where I used to go with my ex-lover, where I remember strolling along in denim on one of the rare days when the creep had acted like he loved me. The February afternoon throbbed with light.

The sand was warm. For the first time in all the months this new man and I had been together, I felt that elusive rush of joy. Suddenly, with my whole being, I wanted him.

And then we ate a bucket of steamed clams and drove home and that same evening I said, “Yes, the answer is yes; ask the question,” and he answered, “Will you marry me?” and I could finally say yes.

Only later did I understand what had done the trick. It was place that did it, and also his blue jeans, so that I could slip the body of the new lover into a likeness of the old, as if I had melded the two, the unwinnable rejecter and the good – and – true, so that the aura of one illuminated the other.

I had to return bodily to the scarcity of love in order to relive the excitement attached to its occasional bestowal.

What I had been taking for chemistry was more correctly suspense. It was the flutter people feel as they watch the lottery balls jump, the flutter we are supposed to vicariously identify with as the Academy Awards nominees await the opening of the envelope: the suspense of uncertainty. Will I be chosen, will I be loved?

But what a tragic waste of hope, forever waiting to loved by the Marlboro Man. The Marlboro Man doesn’t need you.

That’s the point. What else could make him so damned attractive?

In my case, the man I kept falling for, Piaf’s stony legionnaire, was really, predictably enough, the first tall, blond man in my life: my own reticent father, who now, at 75, is so loving it makes me weep.

But he was never the villain. It was more something about me, too eager to please, too finely tuned to correction.

For decades I was still trying to make Daddy say I was good, trying to repair my version of the past.

But over and over I kept choosing critical, rejecting men until the pain of the last one broke me apart and some vestigial sense of self-preservation made me stop.

Of course I understand now that my father didn’t really think I was a terrible person, that he did love me, that my parents and my grandparents corrected me in what they thought was my own interest.

It never occurred to them what lesson I would derive: that the excitement of lover was connected to the constant possibility of its withdrawal.

We never know what we are teaching our children.

I’d like to think I gave my own daughter enough unconditional acceptance to inoculate her against the now-I-love-you/now-I-don’t sort of guy, but clearly I didn’t, or else my love didn’t count because I’m just Ma, and it was her Daddy who said she wasn’t pretty. I can’t imagine why. I wasn’t there and the poor man is dead, so we can’t ask.

The truth is she’s absolutely beautiful. But right now here life is devoted to proving she’s pretty.

So what has she done? Gone and put herself at the mercy of one of these on-again, off-again young men who calls when he feels like being adored.

I want to grab her sculpted chin and look into her deep brown eyes and shake here, really shake her, until those glorious curls poing like door springs. “Stop it,” I want to shout.

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