Over the years I would say that I have fallen in love or much more accurately fallen into lust on numerous occasions. Or perhaps to put more of a Buddhist spin on it I have fallen into intense wanting or craving.
This falling into wanting/craving was most often hormone driven and happened much more often in the 1970’s. Two instances come to mind, one from 1979 and the other actually from 1997.
The first, in 1979, was with an Emergency Room doc who had a bit of cocaine problem and was truly haunted by his Mormon roots. For some reason I found this guy irresistible and wanting to be with him doing whatever and it was an obsession. Interestingly enough, the sex with this guy was very mediocre and had to almost always occur in state of being fucked up usually on cocaine.
Our greatest adventures revolved around his growing psilocybin mushrooms in his apartment on Clayton Street. He very successfully grew many very potent fungi after finally getting the technique down. One major mushroom growing mishap though involved the pressure cooker used to sterilize the grain (rye, I think) used as the medium to grow the mushrooms in and an unfortunate explosion that left gooey rye on the ceiling of his apartment.
The mushrooms, which we dried in a toaster oven, though were a great vehicle for a backpacking trip into the Grand Canyon in the Fall of 1979. I should though have caught on when we had no sex that I remember at all but some very nice nude photography while dodging other hikers.
These same mushrooms several weeks later were my ticket to the dark side while at the Empire Bathes and the end of many years of psychedelic use. Even the Grateful Dead, who consistently provided the safest of all tripping spaces, were not sufficient to entice me back.
That relationship I think simply got to be too much work and around that time I met a man who is a dear friend to this day, a great sex partner and still married to a woman and living in Kansas. I have found that eventually these intense craving relationships burn out and once that starts it fades quickly.
The second “craving relationship” of note was in 1997 about two years after the death of my true loving companion and got started in the showers at the YMCA. This one was all consuming for many months and slowly blended into my second long term relationship with another fellow who in hindsight actually stalked me for months, which lasted until 2009.
Shower man was all I could think of and I schemed endlessly in my head to get together with him. I even bowed to discussing his bible study class over coffee that lasted for several hours. After numerous trysts in the showers, always just jacking off, it was a semi-public place after all, we agreed to meet for drinks one evening in what I thought was a date. He however brought along and introduced me to his lover of many years. This might have still been doable but I was in a more monogamous mood coming off a long-term relationship of 15 years. Which by the way was not monogamous but that had grown into a level of trust that the occasional dalliance was tolerated and actually encouraged. Sometimes sex with a long-term partner can be great after an encounter with someone else.
For me then “being in love” has been a long-term process and the three men with whom I have developed such a partnership were not, except for one of them, men I craved after. These relationships are more like a good soup or stew. They take time and simmering seems to have better outcome that a rapid boil.