My grandson lives in an old sprawling Victorian right off the campus of the university he attends. He shares it with three other twenty something young men, and his best-friend, who had recently moved his girlfriend in to the house.

While my grandson chowed down on the spaghetti I had brought him, the young couple in question came into the kitchen. Introduced to the new love, a slender, pretty, blonde girl, the friend gleefully announced his new love was an archaeology student, much like I was back-in-the-day. We chatted up history and periods, than they said they had to go. I too, needed to leave and walked out of the house with them. I climbed into my car, as I watched this couple climb into their typical college beater. She was driving, and adjusted the mirror with all the beads and flowers dangling from it. I watched them, as she smiled and he looked at her in only the way that says their relationship was new and full of hope and lust. It catapulted me almost forty years back in time to a place, when I was young and in love with a young man who I would have three children with, but wouldn’t see our marriage last to the end of our lives.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off them as they followed me down the street. I watched them in my review mirror, (trying to concentrate on my driving and not them); I found the way they smiled at each other in the heat of true love intoxicating. I envied them, and that new love we never believe will leave us, especially at that age. But it does, by design of life; it passes away like a soft breeze leaving only a faint memory of promises whispered in the night.

I lost them on the streets as I entered the freeway, hoping I’d see them again, still together, still in love.  

My grandson called me a couple of weeks later to request a homemade cheesecake for a house party. It gave me the opportunity to mention the couple, hoping to hear they were still together, still in lust and in love.

He told me they were splitting up and she had already moved out of the house. She was going to Naples, Italy for the summer on a dig. Naples was building a new underground subway, and needed archaeology students to do the back breaking excavation of the tunnels. Through my archaeology connections, I had heard of the project, and even considered spending the summer in the southern Italian heat, fulfilling a dream.

The girl decided to end the relationship, leaving behind her new love for dirt encrusted antiquities. I understood in a lot of ways what she was doing. She was hanging on to a dream that made her lover the sacrificial lamb. I was disappointed she didn’t feel their love would survive the separation. There was no room in her life for him anymore, the past became more important.

When I was a freshman in college I had the opportunity spend the summer in Florence studying. I turned it down, because my true love said he wouldn’t wait. I never had the strength to leave the man I believed I’d love forever. I both admired this young woman’s strength, and pitied the hurt she put on her lover.

My sacrificial lamb was the opportunity to dig in the Tuscan hills. I believed I had a whole year to make my true love understand I’d return to him. He never would be that selfless, and those dreams filled with possibilities, never came my way again. I never stopped regretting the decision.

I was both sympathetic and understanding of what happened to my grandson’s friend. It reminded me that young love can be as beautiful as the bloom of a rose, but not without its thorns.   

Question of the Day: Did you ever make such a sacrifice for a relationship you thought would last forever? Do you still regret it now?