The Interruption of Love

For all of you who followed Stella to Jamaica to get your groove back with a younger man (or at least fantasized about it), here's how the story ends. Ten years later, Stella tells Oprah that the love of her life, the fantasy whom she met in Jamaica is actually gay. Go figure. Only in the twenty-first century do our love stories turn into full blown nightmares.

So Stella a.k.a. Terri McMillan and Winston a.k.a. Jonathan Plummer, her now ex-husband paid Oprah a visit on Wednesday and talked candidly about his coming out and the demise of their six year marriage. Two things were clear as I watched them interact with one another on the show. The first being that she was mad as hell with him when she found out (evidenced by the angry profane phone messages that were played back for the entire viewing audience). The second, based on her body language, she is still in love with him.

The next day at work, my colleagues and I stood around the "water cooler" and discussed the idea of not being able to turn love on and off based on the object of our affection's betrayal (I guess when it comes to matters of the heart, sexual orientation is not the bigger issue). Most of us agreed that it's hard to just stop loving someone even when you want to hate them for hurting you. So, the lesson here... be discriminating about who you actually ALLOW yourself to fall in love with because it's easier to fall in love than to fall out. Some would argue that you can't help who you fall in love with and people don't always show you who they are until you're already in love. Maybe. Maybe not, but be careful anyway. We've all heard the song, "It's a thin line between love and hate." That may be true; however, most of us almost always refuse to take that leap over the line to hate. And who can blame us?

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