Love Life

by Rob Lowe

  It was a double date, a blind one; we had been set up by a friend, and I am forever in his debt. But I’m sure that he could never have imagined that margaritas and chips at a Mexican restaurant would lead to my life today, and looking back these twenty-two years, the fact that it was a blind date seems all the more incredible.

  That I had no preview of how I might feel about Sheryl makes the fact that I came to love her a true odds-defier. But consider Sheryl’s situation: She knows she’s meeting me. Seen a movie or two, read the National Enquirer. Probably heard some opinions about me, possibly from many and probably for quite a while. I was used to everyone having a preconceived notion of who I was.

  Sheryl didn’t.

  She saw parts of me no one had before. She somehow knew I longed to be better than I was. She saw potential in me to be more, as an actor and as a man. As we got to know each other, she emboldened me to do things that I hadn’t dared before. To quit drinking. To get sober. To try to stop chasing the latest, hottest girl. I began to grow.

  When she would visit my Miami Vice–looking Hollywood Hills bachelor pad, she would decorate. I have a vivid memory of her reorganizing the books and items on my coffee table into a design straight out of Ralph Lauren. She would also often insist we stock my kitchen with more than a beer bong and Wolfgang Puck’s frozen pizzas. Then she would cook her special pasta broccoli. While these are not revolutionary efforts, for me they might as well have been. No one had ever thought to do any of it for me before.

  Somehow I had the courage and the foresight to ask her to marry me, and in the most fortunate moment I will surely ever have, she said yes. I had come to see that Sheryl would jump in front of a train for me (I am not speaking metaphorically) and that I was never likely to find her mix of passion, beauty, sexuality, friendship and unconditional love in anyone else.

  I feel that way still. In sobriety, one learns that all anyone has is today. Yesterday cannot be relived. Tomorrow is guaranteed to no one. For me, this is the key to every facet of my life. I try (and sometimes fail) to keep it simple and just do the next right thing. It is a very easy concept but sometimes very hard to do. I haven’t always done it, but I will never stop trying. Sheryl demands only progress, not perfection. She loves me in spite of my flaws.

  I also love her for her shortcomings. When you can love those, and not be resentful or hope they will magically disappear, you are approaching unconditional love. And like any partner who consciously takes stock of their union, Sheryl works hard to grow and better herself.

  It’s easy to lose track of your love affair when the children come. It’s happened to us. It’s hard not to put all your emotional time into the very embodiment of your shared love. After a long day at work, it was sometimes easier to hop in bed with the kids, read Harry Potter and fall asleep with them than do the late-night catch-up of the daily minutiae of running a house, businesses and marriage. But the kids will be only as happy as their parents, which is something to be remembered in our age of total emotional focus on our children. I have had that concept underlined for me recently as our boys prepare to move out and Sheryl and I will once again have each other with nothing to distract us.

  Intimacy does not come to me easily. I am finding, as I continue to try to understand myself, that deep talks do not mean deep relationships, and that in spite of my chronological age, I still have barriers, probably from childhood, that sometimes keep me distant on the inside, although you wouldn’t see it on the outside. Unless, of course, you know me well. I don’t want to be one of those nice guys who people like well enough, I guess, but don’t have a deep connection to. I want to be known. I want to be seen for all I am, not just what you see on the surface. But it is up to me to let you in, to give you the keys to know me in that way, and to do the work of connecting beyond what is comfortable and easy.

  I say this because at twenty-two years into my marriage I have realized that I want to love Sheryl better. I want to refocus on the one thing that has made the most positive impact on my life and changed me beyond my ability to articulate: my love for her.

  I was taught to people-please; Sheryl showed me how to fight for myself. I was an equal-opportunity companion; Sheryl taught me social discretion. I am still a procrastinator in key areas; Sheryl is an example of industrious immediacy. She has a keen and quick instinct for people and events; I am slower on the uptake, too often willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

  She has also taught me, through the long parade of days and nights, through our valleys and all the way up to our euphoric altitudes, that I am worthy of her love. I know I can fail and she will love me. I know I can fall and she will love me and I also know that I will rarely do either with her as my muse, my partner, my lover. She has seen through the veneer that I want everyone to see, the persona I have been fashioning since almost as long as I can remember, to the complicated rough part I hide and often deny I have.

  I want our next chapter to be deeper. And that means digging, and digging is hard, exhausting work. But a recommitment seems important now; maybe it’s moving through the two-decade anniversary, maybe it’s my age. But whatever the reason, I know I want it because my original commitment to that younger version of Sheryl led to a life of bounty I could never have imagined.

  I am not a very superstitious person. Although I do have some superstitions: I won’t mention Macbeth in a theater (or whistle) and won’t walk under ladders. I am also against tempting fate by talking too much of my good fortune in having found Sheryl. No one likes a jinx. But people do ask me how (and why) I embraced marriage, because clearly, I could’ve been a great wingman for George Clooney or my old pal Charlie Sheen (who needs no wingman; he is his own air force).

  Everyone who is married, wants to be married or was married is interested in someone else’s marriage. It’s how we judge our own relationships. It is to what we compare our own story. So I understand why people want to know what I’ve learned about long-term love, just as I wondered about Paul Newman’s marriage. And this, simply, is all I know: Everyone’s love is different. My marriage is not like my parents’ or Sheryl’s parents’, it’s not like my brother’s or my best friend’s and it’s not like yours. In spite of our wanting to, we cannot compare. Our successes and failures in love are unique to us alone. And in the end, that’s because our partners are as one-of-a-kind as we are. I know mine is. She is blond, five feet eight, with blue eyes. She has a widow’s peak and the long legs of a teenager. She has a huge heart. She reads slowly. She is a math genius and often does not find me funny. She is loyal to the last stand and quick to defend. She is a mother to all who need it and to many who don’t. She gives great toasts and is a better public speaker and writer than she will ever know. She is a wellspring of creativity and a lover of bad television. She single-handedly keeps afloat the company that manufactures Swedish Fish, as well as Costco. She has too many Hermès bags and works too hard to pay for them. She has created two successful companies, had at least three different careers and raised two world-class young men. She took a man-child and turned him into a man. She made me what I am today. There will never be another like her and our love, like everyone’s, has no answers and no comparisons.

  Sheryl and I falling in love on location in Israel, 1990.

  New Year’s Eve photo booth fun.

  Love on the red carpet.

  Love Life

  Overthinking, while not as egregious a flaw as, say, lying or murder, is nonetheless a dubious luxury of those with too much time to do it and can stall or force us into some very difficult circumstances in life. Fear of the Wrong Choice has paralyzed many a man from saying yes to the right woman (and vice versa), stopped us from quitting jobs that hold us back, from having the loves of our lives until we’re absolutely sure we’re “ready to have children,” from leaving relationships we need to, and kept us on the wrong side of many other life barriers too numerous to name here. We weigh and we question, we work the angles and list the pros and cons, while we
move one step up and two back toward actually taking action. We delude ourselves that we are doing our due diligence when mostly we are just treading water in a perfectly heated pool of laziness, comfort and fear. You can’t study the map forever. At some point it’s time to start walking; there is only so much daylight.

  I’ve been overthinking this last chapter of the book. Like some Oscar winners I know who agonize over their follow-up work, I’ve gotten precious about writing in the shadow of my first book, wanting the same positive reaction but not wanting to chase it, wanting this one to be better in every way but not wanting to force it. And now, here at the end, I’ve gotten a little tight. I want to go out with a bang; I want to make it count.

  I feel fairly sheepish about this overthinking but after twenty-three years of sobriety, I’ve learned that when you are stuck, the best thing you can do is to start walking. I pick up my pen; let’s get on with this.

  And just like that, as I’ve experienced and observed in my decades in recovery, my willingness opens the door to inspiration. Just now, buckled into seat 3A of Delta’s flight 2040 to JFK, I’ve been given the gift of something I need to write about. Because sitting here with my cheap Bic pen and legal pad, next to a sleeping businessman, something incredible has happened, and I have a confession to make.

  I am no longer sober.

  For the first time in almost as long as I can remember, I have taken a drink. I can feel the alcohol igniting through my veins, making my head feel like a sparkler waved on a summer night and tasting like gasoline. My adrenaline is up and my heart is pumping. I’m filled with both shame and euphoria. I’ve had only the first sip, but already my thoughts fly to the possibilities now awaiting me. I see escape, adventure, dark and daring subterranean sojourns that I wonder if I can still navigate. Or want to. I think of my wife and my sons. Sheryl, who inspired me to get sober, and Matthew and Johnowen, who have never known me not so. It has the exhilaration of rebirth, this first taste, but it also feels like death, foreboding and heavy with the dark and visceral sickly sweetness, that certain precursor to all things that end badly.

  I look around the plane’s cabin to see if anyone is paying attention to me as I hold the drink. They aren’t. But the woman on her iPad is reading TMZ and the headline is “Star of Glee Found Dead in Vancouver Hotel at 31, Had Battled Addiction in Past.”

  As I would have prayed for, I want this opportunity, this fork in the road, to be over. No one would ever be the wiser; it could be my little secret, but I’m thankfully, gratefully, not having it.

  “Excuse me.” I signal the flight attendant. “I asked for an orange juice and you gave me a mimosa.”

  Although I was trying to be as blasé as I could stand, he must have picked up on something, and I watch his face visibly pale.

  “Oh. Oh! I’m so sorry! I . . . I . . . mixed up the order!” he stammers.

  I hand him the mimosa, one sip missing from its full content.

  “I can’t believe I did that! Here, let me get you your orange juice,” he says as he flees to the galley.

  This honest mistake, this bizarre mix-up, has taken about five seconds. Long enough for me to get my unexpected and unwanted dose of Delta’s finest champagne and long enough to see my life flash before my eyes. I’m glad that I don’t have to start over in recovery as a newcomer, giving up my twenty-three years to start at day one. I remember the panic I felt years ago—maybe I was six months sober—when I reached for my Perrier and lime and took my tablemate’s gin and tonic by mistake.

  “If it’s an accident and it’s only one sip, don’t count it,” people who knew better told me. Clearly, I am more even-keeled since that early switch-up, as I didn’t spray this first sip on a sleeping businessman, like the spit take I performed as a newbie.

  Soon both my heart rate and the flustered flight attendant have calmed down. I’m glad I can see the humor in the midair mix-up. I’m glad I had a full pen and a blank pad handy to write about the incident. And I’m reminded that one of the things I love most about life is its surprising way of suddenly placing you in its exciting and mysterious narrative.

  * * *

  My love life began probably earlier than it should have, although it didn’t seem particularly so at the time. But one of the gifts of having children is that they offer the ability to see your long-gone young self as you look upon them. And when I think of my boys in the first grade I know that is not the ideal age to be coerced into an ad-hoc gynecological exam by a third-grade Lolita in her backyard pup tent. In the stifling, musty and mildewed Salvation Army bivouac, the pretty blonde shocked into life what would become a pattern throughout mine: the excitement and buzz of the unexpected romantic rendezvous. This pattern was only reinforced by another, older neighborhood towhead who engineered the loss of my virginity by a sneak attack disguised as a home-cooked dinner when her parents were away. With her birthday gift of a condom, she had, with an admirable lack of subtlety, set the evening’s agenda. And like any red-blooded teen, I took my cue and ran with it.

  Soon, I would get my sea legs and begin to hone the skills all young men need to hunt for love (and sex) in the great big world. And over time I developed a fairly competent facility. But those first two sexual experiences had two consequences that would both help and harm me as the years unfolded.

  When I became a famous teenager, I was already familiar with what it was like to be sought out for the purpose of romance, sex or fantasy. And for those of you who have not been a teen idol, let me assure you that 90 percent of the female fans have almost zero interest in your songs, movies, TV shows, what have you. It is almost exclusively about finding a receptacle for their exploding female sexuality. You are not particularly special, you just happen to be standing in the right place at their right time. When Justin Bieber accepts an MTV Video Music Award (or whatever) and begs to be “taken seriously as an artist,” it is likely because he suspects Biebermania has very little to do with Bieber the artist. And from my experience, he would be correct.

  I had learned from the pup tent and the condom birthday gift to sit back and enjoy it. And while it was a great run from my teens into my twenties and I enjoyed every minute of my time as a young, famous actor, it was too overwhelming, too intense, too fun for me to learn anything about what real love was or to notice that I was mostly immune to, and incapable of, intimacy. I was too young to know that I was squandering/being robbed of the very years when most young men are developing their empathy, vulnerability, honesty and compassion to share with their partner. I had those qualities as an actor because to excel, I had to, but personally I did not, because I didn’t have to, and frankly, it would have been wasted in the world I found myself in.

  Sure, I had relationships, and a number of them were deep and important to me. But even so, I was never really in with both feet. The temptations and situations that present themselves daily to a teen movie star proved too irresistible for me to experience the daily lessons that your first serious relationships should teach you. Jealousy, boredom, commitment, honesty, vulnerability and all the other oftentimes-uncomfortable feelings that come with truly being present for your romantic partner, I was able to disassociate from. If I felt any sort of malaise, instead of learning that all feelings (even bad ones) pass if given time, I made myself feel better by sampling the sexual circus that was always waiting just outside my door. My growing affinity for alcohol only made it easier. It quieted any conscience I might’ve had about bailing on a relationship under the cover of darkness for the Next Big Thing.

  Somewhere, sometime in the mideighties, someone invited me to see the Hot New Act at the Universal Amphitheatre. The show was the talk of LA, sold out and the place to be. The new artist was unlike anything anyone had seen before: provocative, in-your-face sexual and suddenly inescapable on the radio. She was cute and she was young and she was single, and so I sat front-row to check out Madonna.

  Although my tastes in those days ran more to Springsteen, the Stones and Tom Petty, h
er wedding gown/virgin shtick had the desired effect. One of the things I love about life is seeing an artist coming into their moment; this was Madonna’s. That night she was a revelation.

  “Madonna would like to see you backstage,” a security guard said as the house lights came up.

  “Sure!” I answered, although I was surprised she knew I was at the show. In those days, despite starring in movies, I was always shocked that anyone made a fuss over me.

  I was taken to her dressing room. I expected it to be packed with the LA scenesters, but it was just me, some folks from her tour and a rep from the record company.

  Madonna entered wearing a white cotton robe.

  “Hiiii! Nice to meet you. So glad you came!”

  She had flawless skin and eyes that imparted secrets from the moment you saw them.

  We talked about her show; she asked what movie I was working on and so I told her a little about St. Elmo’s Fire, which I had just finished.

  “I play the bad boy,” I said.

  Madonna just smiled. She seemed to like that.

  It was a crazy time in my life, and she was also just exploding. We kept in touch and ran into each other once or twice, but there was never any time where there weren’t people around us, so it never really went anywhere.

  We made a date to meet up in New York City. She was doing a concert and I was shooting the Rolling Stone cover for St. Elmo’s. I was under no illusion that with our insane lives there would ever be room for much of a relationship, but at least some fun was clearly in the offing.

  After my photo shoot I went to meet her at the Palladium, a giant dance club that was filled with rabid “boy-toy” doppelgänger fans of both sexes. It was a madhouse. I could feel our fledgling “date” going awry from the beginning. As I tried to enter the club, someone noticed me, word spread and things got unruly. There was a lot of grabbing and pawing. (This kind of thing never happens today, because most fans need both hands to hold their iPhones while they film you.) Club security grabbed me and bum-rushed me inside.