Everything has to come to an end sometime. -L. Frank Baum

There are very few things that I know to be true and I'm one of those people who has a hard time believing in those things unseen. It's hard for me to wrap my brain around things that I'm unable to hold in my hand.

Love, however, is a different case entirely. One that is to be handled only by those who take diligent care. To quote the star crossed Christian in Moulin Rouge, "Oh, above all things I believe in love." Of the very few things that I know to be true, by far the most important is the existence of love. Even those kinds where you can't physically grasp it.

Now, I've often heard people speak about unrequited love and how it's quite possibly the worst kind. Brilliant authors like William Shakespeare and Nancy Meyers painted stories about that love not returned. And we all cried happy tears when Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles came together in the end of the film depicting Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew". We have all fallen prey to over driven sadness and lonely, whiskey filled nights of obsession. We've danced alone to those sad Al Green records and let reverie consume us as Coltrane's heartfelt blues filled the air.

I remember when I was young, I heard my dad say that every song is a love song. That you can't sing a song if you haven't truly felt it. That without heartbreak, there is no soul. That even in those instrumental melodies that lack expressive words, you can feel the pain and yearning they exude. Musicians convey those words and feelings that we can't find the courage within ourselves to say. Deny it if you will, friends. But I tell you now that for me, truer words have never been spoken. Beautiful music will forever be in the ears of the beholder.

But what I'm really trying to say is: If you have such an innate connection with a person, why isn't it returned? Why doesn't it workout, despite the commonalities? If you can so easily click with another human being, on such a variety of levels, forgive me but why isn't it an insta-relationship?

I'm someone else when I'm with you. Someone more like myself. -Original Sin
I once had this friend. She was a free spirit, a child of nature. A lover of all things retro and evocative. A woman born in the wrong era because no one understands her. No one could quite genuinely appreciate all that she had to offer. She was just different from the rest. An outsider living and craving a different generation.

The days of the gentleman's war, record players, peace signs and nightcaps. The days where men wore suits to clubs, snapped their fingers to Frank Sinatra, and opened the car door for their ladies. The men drank whiskey and wore black, pinstripe Fedoras. The ladies were polished, poised and classy in their stockings and t-strap pumps. They were Debbie Reynolds and Tony Curtis. Natalie Wood and Marlon Brando. Sophia Loren and Cary Grant. They were suave and beautiful. Frozen in black and white, a lifetime away.

She was born to soak herself in the sparkle of Old Hollywood glamour and yet here she was, in the twenty-first century, toting a cell phone and an MP3 player. Texting and emailing. Amidst a generation bred with the inability to verbally communicate. After all, isn't that what the Internet is for?

My lovely throwback friend did inevitably meet a man. And not just a man but an individual that shared her interests in nearly every aspect. It was strange, I remember her telling me, because she didn't necessarily consider it to be "love at first sight". It was a different sort of bond that they shared. More of a click. It seemed that similarities in persona and common interests could perpetuate a breeding ground for love.

Sometimes when you meet someone, there's a click. I don't believe in love at first sight but I believe in that click. Recognition. -Ann Aguirre
Enough time had passed that they started doing everything together. They went on dates, met each others family and spent actual hours talking about movies, music and love. They drank beer and watched the sun go down. They felt an intimate closeness that only Marvin Gaye could explain. They connected in many ways...

And then one day, it all ended.

He met someone else. He said he was moving across the country. That would never be.

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading. -Yevengy Zamyatin
All her recollections got me to thinking because I feel as though this is really a common situation. It's something that plagues all of us at one point or another: that instant click that ends in heartbreak. The connection that should have been. The forever indeterminable unrequited love.

I just can't help but wonder what it is that instigates this premise of unrequited love. It's just that, in a particular situation like this one, where two people come together and instantly click, why can't they stay together? Just date, eventually get married and have forty-three babies, as my lovely model friend would say? Why doesn't it work out, friends? Why can't it just happen?

I had another friend in a similar situation. He's a handsome, raven haired man, barely in his thirties. He's sweet, successful and has dimples that are so great you'll do just about anything to see him smile. The man is a charmer. And a gentleman.

He, quite inevitably, meets a lady.

But not just any lady. They had something different from any of his previous relationships. They shared a genuine and deep bond that held his attention for actual years. They were incredibly different but he was drawn to her.

They bickered a lot, he told me, because they were opposites in virtually every single way. But they just clicked. "I can't explain it any other way," he told me one day, "but we just have this connection. We just click."

So why then, doesn't it work out?

I have never seen this man upset. To be honest, I don't believe that he possesses the capacity to be sad or even stressed. But that day, when he told me their relationship was on the verge of ending, it was written all over his face.

They clicked and there was obviously strong emotion. But it just didn't work.

A heart can be broken but it will keep beating just the same. -Ninny Threadegood, Fried Green Tomatoes
To be honest with you, it's hard for me to identify with this. I mean, I understand it and I sympathize. It's just that my relationships, like the real, concrete relationships that I've had, never ended that way. In fact, they typically ended because that click once experienced between two people in love had dissipated. Or it just never existed.

That crazy, unstable, can't live without you connection has only occurred within one, very solid relationship of mine. And we've been married for three and a half years.

Something I've seen among those sufferers of the severed connection is that time wounds all heals. That click, as we've come to identify it as, doesn't always go away. You try to move on. You make yourself be a grown up person and function. But it's hard to swallow because you know deep down in your black, bitter heart that you'll never connect with anyone the way you did with him (or her). All it takes is that old song or that familiar smirk on the face of a stranger and there it is again, like a ton of bricks.

After all, it takes more than shit loads of whiskey and crying to erase someone's existence from your life. How can you move on with their face forever ingrained in your memory? How can they so easily walk away from a connection so blatant that it actually hurts to breathe without them?

And why, why, why doesn't it just work out? It should be so simple. You love each other. There's something there. Work it out!

Moral of the Crazy: I think this is probably one of those things that we'll never know. One of those sensually distracting riddles that we'll never be able to crack. One of those loaded questions that we'll just never uncover the answer to. Like the Kennedy assassination, the cure to the common cold or how to prevent a hangover.

Relationships that come to a halt at warped speed when that classic click is so obviously prominent can be baffling. I can only offer up minuscule advice to such an unconventional epidemic.

Hold onto those that you click with. Hold onto them tight. Because when you're old and gray and you've only a few things left to live for, one of them should be that brown eyed boy who lets you sing out of tune to Tommy Dorsey. Someone with whom you share that undying, forever present connection, throughout absolutely everything. Because at the end of the day, that's all you've got.

I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, next to cough drops. But life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death. That's all. -William Goldman

The Crazy version of Dear Abby:

Need advice on something vital or love induced? Have some gossip that you desperately need to share? Want to swap idiot boyfriend stories?

Share your stories with me at: katemeyer@verizon.net with the subject line Crazy Face and be anonymously featured in my blog!