Okay. Let’s get semi-serious about love now.

There are five women with whom I learned my greatest life lessons in the following areas: romantic love, that quest to love and be loved by others, the real value of authenticity in relationships, and which dynamics often lead to being really hurt or to really hurting someone else. I absorbed more in my brief time with each of these women than I did in the eight total years I was married.

Tweni, the nickname I gave her, was the first woman with whom I was ever really in love. As in, ever. She was also the first woman I asked out for a date after my second divorce was finalized. Believe me. You never want to be a divorcee’s first date. You’d have better luck at a successful outcome with a starving crocodile.

I met Tweni at an eating disorder residential rehab clinic graduation party (don’t be annoyed at me for that ugly little mouthful of words; I didn’t name the damned thing). My sister was hosting, and it was the ideal environment for me, the overly-emotional, overly-susceptible, freshly divorced, highly analytical guy to meet a vulnerable, over-sharing, timidly excited about her future, pretty girl.

Tweni was fantastically and naturally beautiful even though she didn’t always know it. She had bright straight blonde hair that tumbled just below her shoulders. She was tall and slender and graceful. She was kind. Sweetly shy. Trusting. Humble. We laughed together. She loved me with her whole heart. I really believe that. Later, as we parted ways for the final time, she would tell me through heart-broken tears that she had given me the two things she could never get back. Her first love and her virginity.

I never realized just how much those two things meant until I found myself sitting across from her under a pavilion at the city park, pleading with her to choose me instead. She was getting married to some guy she had fallen for after she finally found the courage to walk away from me and mean it. Through heavy tears, she looked me in the eyes and said the words, “I don’t love you anymore.” It was a necessary lie for her to tell. I had promised her that if she could do that, I would leave her alone for good.

During the several months that preceded that moment, I had pushed Tweni out of my life as hard and as fast and as often as I kept pulling her back in. I really loved her the way I had never loved a woman before her, and so I could not let her go. I also could not trust that love and so I could not keep her.

She was fresh out of rehab when we met. She had never had a boyfriend or been in love. I couldn’t trust that her love for me was real. I was freshly divorced. I had ended up marrying the first woman I dated after my first divorce, and that just led to a hot little red head who, for all I know, might have stabbed me in my sleep if she could have gotten away with it; that’s how much we disliked each other. And because of all that, I couldn’t trust that my love for Tweni could be trusted, either.

It wasn’t until she walked away, and meant it, that those walls I believed were protecting me came barreling down, leaving my heart dangerously exposed. And, once I realized that she actually was going to go through with marrying the other guy, I finally fought for her.

That’s when I knew she was the first woman I had genuinely loved. I never had fought for any other woman in the past. I never felt the agony of having an almost tangible piece of me suddenly disappear the way I did with her. I never cared so deeply for a person that I felt I was losing all the beauty of my future as she turned and walked away. I never felt so strongly for a person that I had no choice but to fight for her. I also never loved someone so much that I could somehow see just how badly my actions had hurt her. Through those final tears, my own heart told me that she deserved so much more happiness than I had given her, and it was time to let her go try and have that.

It was with Tweni that I learned just how dangerous it can be to barricade the human heart. I learned that when the right person comes along, love is going to get through those walls anyway. Putting walls up doesn’t keep that from happening. All it does is prevent me from being able to properly give my love back in return. It keeps the other person firmly trapped on the outside. It does what it is designed to do; it keeps love from progressing. And eventually, the person on the other side of my walls becomes so tired and hurt from being on the other side, that she disappears for good.

Fabulous Mindy was caught in the vortex which followed Tweni. I don’t know if I’ll ever be at peace with what I put Mindy through. It is an impossible situation to fall in love with someone who is in heavy denial of still being in love with someone else. Fabulous Mindy was in love with me. I was still very much in love with the newly married Tweni. And I liked Mindy so much that I wouldn’t admit my feelings for Tweni. I didn’t want to lose such an amazing new woman as I sorted my heart out.

I called her Fabulous Mindy for a reason. She was fabulous. Gorgeous, head to toe. Like Tweni, she also was a blonde, but she was more of the spicy blonde variety; the kind who always does fancy things to her hair and makes your jaw dangle when you show up on her doorstep. The way her eyes lowered slightly down toward her smile when she looked at you was always so cute to me. She often had this expression when we were together that so clearly said, “I’ll love you forever, if you’ll just love me in return.”

She knew I was in love with Tweni. She could sense it. She would ask me about it sometimes. I would always mosey up to the douche-bar any time she did, and order another shot of heavy denial to keep from hurting her feelings. My emphatic declarations that I was over Tweni would keep her around for a little while, but she always knew. I have no doubt about that. She knew I was comparing everything she and I had together to everything I had with Tweni. She knew I was comparing the fun we had together, the laughs we shared, the adventures, and above all how my heart felt in comparison.

The thing was, I wanted so badly to love Mindy. I tried to love Mindy. She was everything I could have asked for in a woman. Beautiful. Fun. Easy going. Similar beliefs. Intelligent. A dedicated mother. A hiking companion. A camping mate. My family and friends all loved her. But she was in that nonsensical vortex that followed true love, and she never stood a real chance. Not when every bit of her, and of us, was being compared to something different that, in my mind, was perfection…

I know how badly it hurts to be stuck in that vortex, pinned up next to an immortal of sorts. I was married to a widow on round two, and let me promise you. The dead somehow have a way of becoming perfect when being compared to the living. One can’t compete with a dead person. Tweni may have been alive and well, but the situation was no different. She was forever lost to me, and my heart would only let itself remember the good and perfect things that we were together.

I learned so much from those few months I shared with Fabulous Mindy. I learned that for me, it is morally wrong to deny my strong romantic feelings for one person in order to keep a different person from leaving. Mindy was such a strong and good woman, and she didn’t deserve that. What I did to her was undeniably wrong. And while I didn’t mean to do it to her, and while I didn’t want to do it to her, and while I really was trying to force myself to get over Tweni so that I could fall in love with her, a better version of me would have been honest with her, and let her make the decision to stay or go based on the truth.

I also learned with Mindy that I cannot simply force my heart to stop loving someone just because not loving them would be more convenient. Real love doesn’t disappear overnight just because the person is suddenly married or because they’re gone. In fact, I don’t think real love ever disappears at all. I will always have a corner of my heart where I keep my love for Tweni tucked away, and I think to some degree I will always still love her.

I am okay with that. The same way I am okay knowing that any person I love now or in the future will have corners in their own hearts forever tucked away for the people they once really loved as well. I will always have a place in my heart tucked away for Fabulous Mindy, too.

I think so much jealousy arises in relationships because we see those lingering pieces of love-now-departed that are forever saddled in the hearts of those we love, and we want them gone, gone, gone. We want them exterminated. We want the people we are currently with to push those others out completely. We want to be their one and only.

Somehow, we fail to see that we can be their one and only, and we can have their whole hearts, even at the same time parts of their hearts forever remember and feel for those who have come before. If we could just openly admit that it is true for each of us, and also be okay that it is true for those we love, many more relationships would flourish beyond the people of the past. I am convinced of that.

Some time after Mindy came the Farmer’s Daughter. It was the nickname I gave to a pretty little brunette with giant green eyes and the cutest pouty lips that would make a man do anything she wants. She was a shy firecracker. Don’t ask me how that worked, just know that it worked and that I loved it. I’ve never had as much satisfying fun with someone I’ve dated as I did with that woman.

A lot of women came and went from my life between Fabulous Mindy and the Farmer’s Daughter, and a lot of women since. I went through my man-whore stage during parts of that, where I didn’t want to actually love anyone but I did want to get it on with everyone.

There was Amanda. She was the six-foot-two West-Coast Swing dancer who I started to really like. After a couple auspicious dates, we had the worst drunk sex imaginable. I am fairly certain one of us fell asleep in the middle of it. She claimed she didn’t remember what went down that night (or who), but she disappeared for good after that (minus a quick drop-by to grab some earrings left behind). Amanda taught me that when a dating relationship starts with sex, it better be damned good sex.

There was Sasha. She was the stunning and tiny five-foot-nothin’ blog fan who showed up to a local Dancing with the Stars charity event I was participating in. She slipped me her number and met me at a karaoke bar a few nights later. We both were tipsy, we made out at the bar (yes, we were that classy), and that night she taught me what fabulous sex really was. It was with Sasha that I learned two things. I learned that with my growing popularity, I could get fans in the sack with little effort. I also learned that it made me feel like a real schmuck when I did. She really liked me, and I took advantage of that and I’m sure I hurt her in the process somewhere.

There was Danika. She was a first year law student who was nice as sugar until it was finals time, then she became mean as nails. Danika had epically perfect augmented breasts of which she always would say, “don’t get used to them, I’m getting those suckers yanked out one day.” I still laugh about that. We tried dating a couple times but ultimately we couldn’t stand each other and decided to try the friendship thing instead. It was with Danika that I learned some people make great friends even though dating is a complete disaster. We are good friends to this day, and I can honestly say that our joint loathing of the times we dated only brings us closer together.

There was Tammy. She was funny as hell and her body would do all these crazy contortionist things that no other woman’s body could do because she was a yoga ninja or something like that. The two of us laughed like crazy. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a first date as much as I did my first date with her. I had never seen a girl laugh the way she did. I even thought I was falling in love with her after a while. Then I learned that she had been high as a kite during that first date. And every date since. I also learned that she was as crazy and mad as a hornet when she didn’t currently have marijuana flowing through her system. I learned with Tammy that who you are authentically is who I will ultimately love or not love. To mask your true self only causes feelings of betrayal and insincerity once the mask comes off, and no lasting relationship can be based on that. I also learned that people who are always high on weed are always late.

There was a woman whose name I literally don’t know. I have her listed in my phone as “The Catfish.” I noticed she was a fan of my blog when I came across her on a dating app. She was passing through town, and would be gone the next day. Texting led to texting, and we decided to have a very innocent and rowdy one-night stand, complete with (according to our texting conversation) pushing each other up against walls, slapping each other’s asses with gusto, and the solid follow-up plan to never talk to each other again once it was over. The woman who showed up on my porch a couple hours later was not the woman from the pictures. She was actually not a woman I could usually be attracted to at all. I learned from her that… Hm. Let’s see. How do I put this? Sometimes it’s better to just say goodnight instead of talking yourself into a bad situation that you know will only get worse just to keep from hurting someone’s feelings. And it did get worse. Sexual attraction cannot be faked. Sexual regret is real. I know that now.

There was Kendra. Kendra Blue Eyes. Poor Kendra. She showed up during a time of my life where my sexuality got a little confusing to me. Because of that, I couldn’t let myself fall for her the way I could have. We became best friends, though. She never judged me or liked me less for who I was and what I was going through. She was an ex-tuba player, just like me, and a hot one. Yeah, how does that happen? She was into Magic cards. And she was gorgeous. How does that happen? She also had the bluest eyes I had ever seen on a brunette. One day she showed up on my doorstep and told me she was leaving the next day for Alaska to work things out with her estranged husband. And she did just that. Kendra taught me that a truly good person loves you no matter who you are or what you’re going through. I don’t know that I’ll ever meet another person as accepting of all humans as Kendra was.

After Kendra there were several other women. I was going on two or three dates every week simply because I had nothing better to do on the nights that I didn’t have my son.

I learned through all of them that it doesn’t matter who I am dating. I click with whom I click with. I fall for whom I fall for. I don’t choose the person I love. Love chooses me.

There was Jamie with whom I learned that some people never wear underwear, a fact that was offered up within three minutes of meeting. Fortunately, this person never got a chance to prove it to me.

There was Mary. We went on several dates and I think we really liked each other, but she was caught in a different type of vortex: the “I need to be less of a man whore” vortex. She was the first woman I dated after declaring to myself that “I ain’t gonna have sex with anyone until we’ve been on at least five dates!” This just led to all sorts of weird dry humping and one confused woman who finally grew tired of it. I learned from Mary that simply stopping frivolous sex cold turkey when one has been having all sorts of fabulous sex of late will lead to nothing but the delivery of pelvic bruises and complete relationship awkwardness. I’m sure her friends snicker to this day when my name is brought up, and I’m probably known now only as “The Rigorous Levi Lover” in their circle…

There was Colette. I learned from her that some people straight-up lie about who they are at the beginning of relationships. She told me she was single, never married, and was a practicing family lawyer. By the end of the date she slipped on her fibs and the truth was all revealed that she was a not-yet-divorced mom, mother of three, telemarketer. Once her lies blew up in her face, she threw it out there that she also didn’t wear underwear, I suppose hoping it would somehow revive the date. It didn’t.

There was Reagan, with whom I learned that some people can go an entire date and never say more than one word in any five-minute span.

There was Taylor. It was on this date I learned that some people literally cannot smell their own overpowering body odor. I may have cried that night the way one cries over a particularly potent onion.

There was Brooke.  I learned from her that some women my age are already “mothers” to more than six cats. This was almost as remarkable as the fact that she also played the accordion and had it in her car in case I wanted to hear her play. Which I did. And it was a mind-blowing private concert. Be jealous.

There were many others, all of whom taught me about life and about love.

And rarely did I get it on in the bedroom with any of them after Kendra Blue Eyes and before The Farmer’s Daughter.

For some reason, something had pulled me hard and fast out of my whorish ways with Kendra. I became much pickier about who I took it off for.

I’m not an idiot. I know that jumping into the sack twelve minutes after meeting someone makes it almost impossible to cultivate any type of real relationship centered on love and respect for one another. I also knew that all that sex wasn’t me at all, and I didn’t want to turn into one of those guys. You know. The kind who literally wants nothing but sex, and arrives at the end of his shortened, sad life, reduced to little more than a walking billboard for gonosyphiherpelaids. I knew I needed to slow the fuck down (pun definitely intended), and so I found a way to do it… Which apparently was to dry hump my way to better habits with whomever came next. Which did and didn’t work.

As it turns out, dry humping to stop slutting around is akin to chewing Nicorette Gum to stop smoking. It was a wean to an end. Sorry, Mary. I deserve to be snickered at by more than just your friends for that one. I acknowledge that.

Anyway, besides cutting back on frivolous sex, I decided to try and really date again. I began dating to meet new people. I began dating to find love and to find a partner and a best friend, with sex being an added benefit instead of a driving force. I began dating to find any person who could officially take over the very large part of my heart that still, even that late in the game, seemed to somehow belong to Tweni.

And then I met the Farmer’s Daughter.

She didn’t just take over my heart. She did it with authority. And after hurting Mindy, I always promised myself that the next woman to own my heart would be the one who walked in and took it away from Tweni, whether I liked it or not.

There was so much to love about the Farmer’s Daughter. The way she giggled when she got both nervous and excited at the thought of me sharing a piece of her with hundreds of thousands of people on my blog. Her cute little insecurities that made her pouty lip come out and take over the scene. The way we made plans to watch a movie and would lay in bed irritating each other and wrestling for hours instead. The way she trusted me to do silly things like bench press her or balance on a giant Swiss ball with her on my back. The way she cried when she got drunk on wine. The way we playfully argued with each other about who the boss was in our relationship. The way she fully accepted people who weren’t exactly the same as she was. The way we spent hours scrolling between country songs, seeing who could scream out the artist first. The way she loved my son. The way she loved me.

God, I loved that woman.

Don’t get me wrong. There are things she did that would have driven me bat shit crazy if I let them. The way she wouldn’t say what was really on her mind sometimes for fear that it would sound foolish. The way she wouldn’t give me a proper snog when she was wearing freshly applied lip gloss. The way she saw herself as less than beautiful so often. The way she she’d pull out that pouty lip and was never afraid to beat me with it.

Her flaws were ultimately beautiful to me because they were part of who she integrally was. Her flaws also had a way of reminding me that I do plenty of things that could drive her bat shit crazy, too. If she let them. But we loved each other, so we didn’t just look past the quirks, and the flaws, and the weirdnesses, but we embraced them and found the deeper beauty that somehow existed in all of them.

I had something incredible with the Farmer’s Daughter going. I thought that love would last a lifetime.

It didn’t.

Ultimately we had different end goals, and different ideas of how to get there. We both wanted such different outcomes in life when it came down to it, and there never was a good way to mesh those goals into one congruous journey together. We eventually had our tearful goodbye and went our separate ways to listen to our sad country songs alone once more.

A year later I would meet, fall hard for, and allow my entirety to be overwhelmed by one woman. Becky. Becky the dancer. The intellect. The sensationalist. The sensualist. The laugher. The woman so replete of what was at times such incredible and other times such destructive wisdom. The gal whom I would ultimately let extinguish so much of what was shining bright inside of me when I met her.

I tried, but the story of Becky, and the vast lessons learned surviving that love, cannot be stuffed into the final paragraphs of one collective chapter such as this, and so right there is where I will leave it.

After Becky, and with a heart still freshly ground into hamburger, came Olivia. She was the last woman I loved deeply (and also lost) as of making my final edits on this chapter which I have been culminating for nearly three years now.

Yes, after Becky was Olivia.

Olivia the emotive. The vulnerable. The hilarious. The sexy. The awe-inspiring. The sweetheart. The empathetic. The giver. She was such a giver. Olivia was saturated in complex goodness. Oh, she wasn’t faultless by any stretch of the imagination. But she was so much the opposite of Becky. She loved me for exactly the person I am and never wanted anything but to be loved and admired and to develop as a person alongside me. And even though I was deeply in love with Olivia while we were together, I broke her heart for some fucking reason. I broke it by inventing endless reasons why her love for me couldn’t be real, and then finally believing my stupid reasons to the point that I pushed her away and broke things off.

I attempted to write about Olivia, along with the lessons I have learned from that relationship as well. I couldn’t do it. That one is still fresh. Too fresh. It all came to an end only weeks ago, as a matter of fact, and book deadlines don’t seem to care about fragile or soggy emotions.

No, this chapter’s truly scrutinizing glimpses into love-gone-wrong for me must end three years ago on The Farmer’s Daughter. My heart cannot handle dissecting more of itself than I have for all of you.

I have only shared what I have thus far because I believe that for so many humans, the pursuit of love is the most difficult part of our existence to be brutally honest with ourselves about. And… hearing someone else’s perspective sometimes gives us the unexpected ability to find a little more of our own, so why not share…

Love is a weird thing we so deeply crave and desire and need, yet – in it or after it – we rarely allow ourselves to acknowledge the harder self-truths which exist alongside it. Love is full of such hard truths; truths which are obscured by our own insecurities, muddied self-conceptions, our egos, and our need to remain lovable to those we are with, or to those who may one day venture into our paths.

In other words, taking ownership of our half of the shit is the last thing any of us want to do when it comes to relationships because we simultaneously have a need to know that we’re always still lovable.

But… Ugh.

Those truths are so fucking valuable to get cozy with. They shouldn’t be feared or disguised or buried. Every one of them is a lesson which, if learned with integrity, will add such richness and passion into our relationships with the right people down the road, as well as with the people we have in our lives right now. In every relationship, big or small, lasting or temporary, romantic or platonic, parent or offspring, the invitation to learn life’s most valuable lessons is always extended to each of us, if we’ll just let ourselves go there.

I learned so much from dating each of these women. I learned that I cannot and never will be able to predict the future of any relationship. What beautiful thing I may share with one person today can so easily – and at any point – go down in surprising flames, leaving love behind as only an overly-ripened aftertaste to whatever it was the two of us were once enjoying. I learned that whatever good thing I have going right now – with anyone – could last a week, a month, a year, or it could very well last the rest of our lives. There are no guarantees in love. Ever. And being okay with that idea sets me free to love without ridiculous boundaries in the times that I do happen into it.

Women. Dating. The need to be loved and the need to give love to others. The desire for true intimacy. The journey to be comfortably known by another person. None of it is a game for me. It is, and always has been, an ongoing and sincere expedition full of bewildering life lessons, extraordinary self-discovery, and deep introspection.

What I have learned over the years about this thing called love, and relationships, and by dating so many pretty ladies, and of sex, and of happiness, and the laughter, and the tears, and of all of it really, is this…

Life is ultimately better with the right person by my side at night, and life is ultimately worse with the wrong person there as well.

Love is not actually the challenge. For me, the true challenges exist in seeking out, finally finding, fully trusting, and holding onto the right person amid all the seemingly unending turbulence that life loves to mix into the whole of it.

He thinks the people he dates are disposable. He doesn’t appreciate love and he’s not willing to work for it when he finds it. He gives up way too easily. He is never satisfied with what he has. He doesn’t care who he drags in, and who gets hurt along the way.

To look at my love life from the outside, it would be so natural and easy to come to any of those conclusions. I know this because I have been told all of these things either by family members, friends, and most often by my readers after any relationship comes to an end. How could they not come to such conclusions? I don’t really share any of the intimate details of my break-ups. Those particulars are mine, and I have no desire to muck them up and grind them down by passing them around to people who don’t have any business knowing them.

The real truth is this. I have – and always have had – sincere hope that I’ll one day find my lifelong someone.

I do.

I also believe that only time can confirm to any of us what our futures will look like, whom those futures will include, and whom they will not. The more we try to control our outcomes, the more those thoughts begin to control us.

I have no idea if I will have found love or be with someone when you, dear reader, pick up this book.

I can’t predict the future. No person can prognosticate lasting love. All we can do is size up the past, do our best to appreciate and understand the people we love, and make the best decisions we can moving forward. We must learn to appreciate what and who we have by our sides, continually seek out the important things we feel are missing, and be content with so much less than perfection, both in ourselves, and in others.

So often we seek for happiness in and through romantic love. I have come to believe this is a great mirage in a vast desert of uncertainty. Happiness is the sweet siren which shows us that which we think we want, and always delivers us something else, far more destructive, altogether.

No, I no longer seek happiness in my quest for love. I seek contentment. I seek to be at peace and fulfilled with so much less than a fairytale. I continually search for the person who will come to understand me, comes to deeply knows my flaws, and then accepts me alongside those flaws and that understanding. I search for that person who will somehow learn not to hide her true self from me, and who trusts me just as fully with her own set of shortcomings. If I can find that person, I know I will be content.

I also do not seek happiness when I am alone. I seek contentment in those times of my life with even more fervor. I continually attempt to understand myself, to come to deeply know my own flaws, and to accept myself alongside those flaws. When I am alone, I search for that version of me who will learn not to hide his true self from himself, and who will trust others with his own set of shortcomings. If I can find that person, I know I will be content.

And if I am content, happiness will simply exist. It will exist automatically and with no further effort on my part, whether it’s paired-up with someone or completely on my own.

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