The course of true love never did run smooth.

So Lysander tells Hermia early on in A Midsummer Night's Dream, while they are whining about Theseus (the Duke) and Egeus (Hermia's father) not supporting their plans to marry and planning their elopement.  Now, I would run screaming away from any man who dared "advise" me in the condescending tone with which most Lysanders (on film, anyway) speak that line to most Hermias.  But then I'm single and pushing 30, so what do I know?  Maybe I should just find some guy, keep my mouth shut, and learn to be a good little woman.  My friends who've gone that route have gotten cute babies out of the deal.

Anyway, I'm currently teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream in one of my classes.  And I had dinner last night with The First, who was travelling through the area and about whom I've written before.  And things with The One remain as unsettled as ever.  So on the way home last night I got to thinking about this line.  

The First was (duh) my first true love (I'm reminded here of Dave Barry's joke about the White House as "one of the world's most imaginatively named buildings").  And things were not necessarily smooth when we were together: we're each the wrong race for the other's parents,  we were very young and silly, we had different careers in different places . . . the usual drill.  But in the five-plus years since our breakup, it has remained a true (if different in character) love.  We get along fantastically and have a surprising number of common interests for a football coach and a teacher.  This is one of maybe three people on Earth with whom I am totally honest and unvarnished, and we've supported each other through various life milestones--all the while laughing and back-and-forthing about the Sox-Yankees.

We've both continued our dating lives--I dated a few forgettable guys and met The One; he's dated around and managed two serious relationships, one of which is currently past the year mark and apparently quite happy, though he insists "I'm not getting married no time soon."

Be that as it may, yesterday was the first time in the last five years that I've seen The First and felt no undercurrent of yearning for what was from either side.  Every other time we've seen each other over the years, there's either been one of us single, or one of us troubled in the current relationship . . . cue Barbra Streisand singing "The Way We Were."

But yesterday, even while we were hugging good-bye and I was agreeing that he really should move back here (home for him, lived here all but three years of his life), I felt for the first time that--friends though we are--we are both entirely the emotional property of others and no longer need/want to think about what might have been.  

This thought made me smile, because maybe I was right at 16 that you need true friends more than you need a true love, and what friends share is one kind of love, and this kind "does run smooth."

Then last night I had a series of dreams in which first The First and then The One permanently and differently disappeared from my life, and I woke up this morning in hideous pain throughout every joint in my body.

Is that Puck laughing I here?