4/30/03: 2 AM: What if love is not enough?

Her name was Charmaine Diane Pierson. I can honestly say, in retrospect, that she loved me the best way she knew how. As it turned out, that wasn't enough for either of us.

Let's start with the good: The day I met her, one Saturday afternoon at the old offices of the Los Angeles Sentinel on Central Avenue, she was one of the most gorgeous women I'd ever seen. She stood five foot ten -- six even in the heels she favored -- and weighed in just under 170 pounds, all in the right places. Turns out that she'd just gotten better from having a month-long sickness and had lost something like 30 pounds, and she'd never been that "little" in her life. Boy, was she happy about it.

Charmaine was never shy about showing off her body. The day I met her -- a fairly regular day in LA, probably in the 80s -- she was wearing a tight short sleeved sweater that rode high on her then-flat tummy, and a pair of brown shorts that barely made it to the tail end of her ... well, tail. She was amazing. Despite warnings from Marsha, my surrogate big sister and marginal boss (I was an intern at the Sentinel that summer), I asked her out.

We hit it off quickly, ending up in bed after our second date. I told her I wanted to wait, so we could really explore a relationship. Since then, that line became game, but back then I meant it. She was shocked and honored, since she'd never been respected it seemed. We ended up together for the better part of three years.

Charmaine was ... a doting girlfriend. She practically lived at my apartment, wherever that was (from USC's famed "Fraternity Row" the year I had an apartment there to LA's Koreatown when I moved up there). When my roommate Spencer left me standing with a $750 rent bill, she turned in her student loan and helped me foot the cost. She was a voracious lover, and was barely ever far from my side.

It wasn't all sunbeams and slow dancing -- Charmaine was endlessly jealous. In supermarkets, she'd accuse me of ogling women on other aisles. I'd find myself on the business end of angry eyes whenever I was a few seconds late. In retrospect, I've been told that her own insecurities played a role in that, not anything I did. I've also been told, retroactively, that perhaps the lady protested so much to cover up her own ... indiscretions. In any case, we had as much rockiness as we had smooth.

We ended up breaking up over me finding more to do with my time than dote on her. My career as a graphic designer was taking off, and I was out trying to scour up business. Charmaine was a Leo who demanded a great deal of fawning, and that had always been a point of contention. She was a good sister who meant well, but the combination of her personal baggage and our relative maturity levels made it impossible.

Nikia was ... different. Nikia was one of the most intense people I'd ever met, a mean-spirited and passionate woman of great talent and ability. Nikia was, without a doubt, a "ride or die chick." I once mentioned in passing that I wanted to kill people, and not only was she okay with that, she encouraged me. We had almost identical political beliefs, almost identical behaviors (we both loved nothing better than attacking people verbally), we were, in the end, too identical.

Unfortunately, a lot of our relationship involved me enduring pain. It went really wrong when, after Thankstaking dinner with her family (who all loved me and were pushing me pretty hard towards marrying her), I came back to her apartment on that Friday night (1998, FYI) and she told me, "I've really tried, I really feel like I should love you ..." I walked out and barely looked back. We were so good on paper, it seemed, with everything lining up so perfectly, Nikia started out with me because it made sense. In the end, she wasn't able to convince herself, and that was simply too much for my fragile ego to bear.

I met Nikia many years before -- she was an intern at Image Magazine, and I'd had an on-again-off-again position as assistant editor there (Image had some amazing monetary problems). Back then she was hungry, looking for chances to get in the journalism game and had that kind of early-Lisa-Bonet-on-Cosby-Show kind of cute. I didn't have a lot to say to her, but I found her energy infectious and her sassiness amusing.

Nikia moved away to New York for a few years, and when she came back she was tighter than spandex at a meeting for Weight Watchers dropouts. She'd always been conscious, but now she was this headwrapped, wrap-clad, curvy goddess quick to suck her teeth and tell you about yourself. I was suddenly smitten with her, but she started seeing this emcee I knew as Studious, but she called Steve. That relationship went amazingly badly, so much so that Steve was never the same cat again, and Nikia often talked about that time as a mistake on her part.

We both had a real passion for intimacy. I don't want to go into details, but we were very into each other when we started. She developed a health condition which made that kind of intense physical relationship impossible, and that's where the chinks in our armor began. I knew Nikia had a mean streak -- it was part of what attracted me to her -- but her mean didn't have an off switch, and was omnidirectional. Whereas I worked hard (not hard enough, as I'll note in a bit) not to bring the storms and venoms home, she craved that. It made being with her a challenge.

So we had a brief but fiery relationship that ended ugly. In the years since, when we see one another, we're civil, but we could never have the friendship or communication we had then.

None of these relationships were as important to me as my marriage to Yuri, and nowhere else did I fail as powerfully.

I met Yuri just a little while after terminating my relationship with Nikia. Funny side note: Nikia dated Yuri's older brother Tzegai, some years ago. About a month before I met Yuri, she ran into Nikia at Border's. When Yuri asked Nikia how she was doing, Nikia said, "I think I made the worst mistake of my whole life," in reference to her last relationship, which I discovered was meant to imply me. I don't know what that means.

Yuri was remarkably different from virtually everyone I'd dated. She was nice. Really, deeply nice. Good on a fundamental level. It was me, making a conscious effort to change. After Nikia, an old cliche kept going in my head: "if you continue to do what you have always done, you will continue to get what you've always gotten." I really didn't want that.

We really had a kind of a storybook romance, much of which is chronicled in our Flight Manual chapbook. The night of our first date, we had Indian and talked at a coffeehouse. As I dropped her off at home, I said, "Last chance to kiss me goodnight," which she found bold and amusing, complying. The next night we went out to see a foreign art film (Life is Beautiful, which was actually okay), and she wrote a poem for me. We were fast and furious, deeply committed within months (I actually dumped two other women to be with her), engaged by the end of the year, married nine months after that.

We both decided, when it was all said and done, that we were unrealistic about our expectations of the other. I judged her far too harshly, and she really did love me the best way she could. Likewise, I poured everything I had into our marriage, but I just wasn't able to weave my way through the pain of my shattered career and my loss of faith in humanity. There's no enmity between us (as of this writing -- I'm scared to start dating before the paperwork is settled).

I started to notice a scary pattern -- despite my efforts, I bring home my anger. My goal is "conflict abroad, tranquility at home," and I'm able to pull it off for a while, but over long periods of time I can't keep my real venom out of my personal life. It helped destroy my marriage, a fact that saddens me so much I can barely even breathe when I think about it. I was no different with Charmaine. I wanted people to love me on my terms, which is unfair, and which I hope I can work my way through in therapy (which I gave in and began).

In each of these cases, love was not enough. No matter how much Charmaine loved me, I wasn't able to satisfy her hunger for attention. No matter how much I loved Nikia, I couldn't stop her from hurting me. No matter how much Yuri and I loved one another (and we really did, it was a really amazing thing at its height), we couldn't work our way past the pain in our lives to find a common solution, and we let it go far too long for either of us to sop up the bad blood and save the marriage.

There's not really any earth-shattering revelations here. I'm just kind of chronicling things as they happen.