Crazy Little Contest winner!

A little over a week ago I posted a contest to win a signed copy of "Crazy Little Thing: Why Love and Sex Drive Us Mad," my book on some of the neurochemistry and psychology of love and why it makes us do the screwy things it makes us do. My winner really surprised me - I got fun tales of some surprise transgender revelations and stick situations involving poison ivy but my favorite was from someone who didn't want their name used and whom I'm going to call Heathcliff*....though his story doesn't end tragically:

“I met and fell in love with a girl I met while getting my MBA. We started to date, and a few months after were engaged to be married. We were inseparable and did everything together. We loved to cook together and we traveled exceptionally well together. We were truly very much in love with each other. As graduation got closer, baggage from our previous relationships started to creep into our relationship. We both had recently been divorced. With two weeks left in the program, she broke up with me,” he writes, and it wasn’t an easy split. Life - including graduation - went on, but “I was completely heart broken. We didn’t speak for a full year. We dated other people and went on with our lives, while at the same time repairing the issues that lead to our break up. Almost exactly a year after we last spoke, she reached out. We met for drinks, and she asked how I was doing. I tried to conceal the affection I still had, and said, “I’ve moved on.” She responded, “well, what if I tell you I haven’t.” I ordered a double whiskey. We talked. We explored. We forgave. We realized we were still very much in love with each other. We made an agenda, set goals, and took it slow. Well, sort of…” They married relatively recently and “are sincerely in a better place today because of our breakup…love works.”


WHEN I SHARED THIS with a novelist friend, he agreed, saying "My favorite line is "I ordered a double whiskey." Here, he said, is man concealing his love for a woman, trying to play it cool and finding she still loves him...the double whisky felt thoroughly authentic.
For me the pathos came with the feeling the weight of carrying on with a broken heart only to find out your feelings actually are shared. Who can forget Emma Thompson as the reserved, sensible Elinor Dashwood in "Sense and Sensibiltiy" when she finds that Edward still loves her after she thought he'd married someone else? The complexity of love is sometimes most masterfully shown in a few seconds like those.


So even though there are no arrests for violent crime, no alligator-skinned people and no vampire conventions (like there are in Crazy Little Thing Heathcliff's story had the element that so many stories of deep connection - and that we can connect with deeply - have got which is the notion that "The heart has reasons that reason knows not of." I love knowing that it happens outside the movies. Thanks, Healthcliff!
      And thanks to everyone else who wrote to me! There are probably going to be other contests coming up so stay tuned! And cheers!




*(the woodcut image of Healthcliff and Cathy above from a very nice blog by Fairweather Lewis on the power of illustrations in books)

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