She was very beautiful and very young and very confused. And ours was a love of frightening intensity.

I was older than she was when we met, in my twenties. She was in her last year of high school. She had no contact with her mother, and what family she had in this country had abandoned her when she reported her father for molesting her when she was twelve. Our romance sputtered into being over the course of a year. I should have taken my cue then, from all the false starts and aborted attempts at romance, that the relationship was imperiled from the beginning. But her charms were a heady intoxication that I was too weak to resist.

Four times in the following three years she would break off our engagement. I was downright Byron-esque in my romanticism – this was love of the crashing waves and earth-shaking thunder variety. I didn’t understand that the virulent ebbs and flows of our own little Wagnerian opera were atypical and the signs of a deeply troubled relationship.

My first CD player had limited functionality, but one feature it did have was a repeat button, and I made good use of it. I would listen to “I Want You” by Stiff Little Fingers all night long in the ebbs of our romance, wallowing, waiting for the flow, for her to come back, to beg my forgiveness and swear undying love for me. Again. And again.

You can only be on the end of an emotional yo-yo for so long before reality breaks through and becomes obvious even to the most stubborn of fools. In the end I moved away from her and out of state to strengthen my resolve. Now, for the last ten years I have been very happily married to someone else. My wife and I have disagreed, before our marriage and during, but not once did it threaten the evening, much less the relationship. I’ve boasted that our marriage is built on communication, on not letting little things get big, and about not keeping secrets. On our way to our son’s soccer game last week, listening to her new iPod over the car stereo, I heard that familiar guitar and the plaintive wails of a tortured man. “Isn’t this a great song? It’s so sad,” my wife said. “I found it going through a box of CDs you had out in the garage.”

I realized then that I had at least one secret. Not the girl, my wife knows about her. She just doesn’t know about the song.