Breaking hearts and minds

So down at the flower market I bought a rose, crunched back through the snow and put it under a windscreen wiper of her UN car. I hoped she would recognise it was from me. All that day I waited to hear from her. But the phone call never came, so the next day I did it all over again. Still there was no word of acknowledgment.

Finally, on the third morning, I put the rose under her windscreen wiper and then sheepishly waited in a doorway to see what would happen. Would C arrive at 7.30am to drive her car to her office, spot the rose, smile, pluck it from the windscreen and keep it? Or would she trample it underfoot in the slush where our love lay? I was cold and miserable but I needed to know.

But before C could appear from her flat, a young man emerged from a neighbouring building. He briskly walked across the snowy street straight to C's car, snatched my rose and went off, evidently planning to present it to his own girlfriend. As I watched him through gritted teeth I realised C had never received any of my flowers. I never won back her heart either.

Under siege, Sarajevo had been a selfless place where, facing death every day, people rallied round helping each other. Now, this experience showed that, at peace, it had sunk back to its natural state of affairs: a city like any other, where human greed and selfishness are supreme.

I laugh about this idiocy now. Or try to. It can be real agony, too, even today. When it comes to unrequited love, I am a textbook case. Indeed, from a young age I learnt how dangerous romantic attachments can be.

When I was 18, I ran away to join the French Foreign Legion after a love affair with a French girl called Sophie had gone wrong. She was my first love and three years older than me. We met in the unlikely surroundings of a hotel in the Midlands, where she was training and improving her English, and she took me back to her flat.

In due course, she left for Paris. I pursued her and turned up on the doorstep of her little studio in the 15th arrondissement - only to find her with another man with whom she believed there would be a future. So, on a grey November morning, I presented myself at the Fort de Nogent on the eastern edge of Paris, guarded by stern-faced legionnaires, and was signed on under the pseudonym Jack Summers by a roaring bull of a sergeant.

I thought that a change of life through foreign military adventure was the best cure for a chagrin d'amour, a broken heart. I confess it worked.

Herein, I think, by seeking foreign adventures, I was sowing the thorns of a life of romantic turmoil. There is a link between my experience of love and the job of foreign correspondent. The trade can be a compulsion so strong, it shatters other bonds. The commitment is often too much to the story at the expense of everything else.

A big part of war reporting is to get to know people and places at moments of unspeakable pain, and as a journalist I have an unstoppable curiosity about life and human beings. But I have been plagued, too, by a short attention span, particularly at the outset of my career, and self-protection has meant never entirely wanting to reveal my true self. In going off to war I was yearning, too, to get to know the untamed side of myself. One kind of turmoil leads to another, and I was far too selfish to be interested in a permanent relationship with anyone.

War, in my experience, brings out all the faults and virtues of men. It makes us both angels and beasts. And living on the razor edge of fear heightens all appetites. Amid the blood, mud and heartbreak of the battlefields, sex meant life itself. We needed it like we needed to breathe good air.

Later, the Vietnam war became the pivotal event in my life, and I fell madly in love with a French-Vietnamese girl. The affair was made even more intense by the war and the extraordinary events we witnessed. Even so, it also ended disastrously in disillusionment and failure. And for the first time I learnt the important lesson that I continue to learn: that unless one really takes care, the demands of a war correspondent will run roughshod over one's personal life.

Too often, then and later, I made my fantasies real, only to be disappointed. But in Vietnam, in Jacqueline, I found and lost a true love. There have been many other episodes and a lovely marriage, broken by my infidelity. But, through the pain of separations, I have never quite lost my conviction that Alfred Lord Tennyson was right when he wrote: "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Mother Teresa once said that the "hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread". While I am sure starving Africans would disagree with her, love for me remains a life force. Our lives are made up of moments and people we treasure; our doomed love affairs are painful but still beautiful. This conviction has led me into all sorts of situations, scrapes, dilemmas and delusions. Waiting on the platform of Zagreb railway station, for instance, flowers in hand, to surprise a girl arriving on a train from Hungary, it never occurred to me that she would be travelling with another man. She was, and I beat an embarrassed retreat when I spotted her descending from the train, all smiles, with her beau in tow.

Or in Chad, getting involved with an intrepid blonde pilot flying for the International Red Cross, I had to leave in a hurry when a high-ranking French officer, then the most powerful man in the land, with whom it was impossible, dangerous even, to compete, got a hint of my interest in his mistress.

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Or being invited by a woman in Brittany to share an exciting night with her in the bed of Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II and France's most famous courtesan, while her antique-dealer husband was absent from home.

In Paris, there was a romance with a freelance photographer with a Canadian passport called Patricia Roxburgh. She wanted to take me off to Libya to interview Colonel Gadaffi, who had just seized power. Nothing much came of it. Perhaps just as well: a few years later, in 1973, after I had left France and moved to Vietnam, Patricia hit the headlines when she was arrested in Norway on a conspiracy-to-murder charge.

Her real name was not Patricia Roxburgh but Sylvia Rafael. She was part of a Mossad hit team that had been mobilised to hunt the Black September terrorists who had killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Sylvia's team gunned down a man they blamed for the massacre, but the man they shot 13 times in front of his pregnant girlfriend was an innocent waiter.

In her secret career for Mossad, which started when she lived on a kibbutz in Israel, Sylvia had been involved in several assassination operations against the Munich terrorists. She got a light sentence, married her Norwegian defence lawyer, and moved back to South Africa, where she died last February from leukaemia.

Sitting with such memories for company isn't healthy. Life is something to be filled up well, and sometimes we fill it up so full that it breaks. So be it. Love, in my experience, almost always sails perilously close to heartbreak - the greater the love, the greater the sorrow when it goes wrong. But the game has to go on. Contrary to some of my experiences, I still have a profound belief in the possibility of long-term love.

A wise friend I consulted believes Tennyson's saying about loving and losing is right only if one can love again and again. "Just to have a life where you have loved once or even twice and nothing happens afterwards is agony," she says. "It is like being a starving person who once or twice is given a proper meal, and the rest of the time lives on stones and water from puddles." Some people never fall in love. Others fall in love from birth to death. And loving and losing is not the same as unrequited love. The former implies some success at love so that something exists to lose. The latter is one-sided and there is nothing much to lose except one's own sanity.

Like other romantics I know, I am perhaps doomed to go through life searching for love, finding it and losing it again and again. But that is not the point. I am sure that in my final moments, what will be in my mind is not mundane things like my bank balance or my house. It will be the image of the woman I love. But what a fool love can make of you in the meantime.

THE OBSESSIVE MAN

Sam, 26, and Caroline, 20, date for a year until she decides he is too possessive and finishes with him. Sam starts turning up at her door at odd times, sending passionate letters and threatening suicide. How can she get rid of him?

Dr Glenn Wilson says: You call this love? No, it's obsession. Caroline must be strong and make it crystal-clear to him that the relationship is over, but in a way that isn't hurtful or accusatory — for instance, by saying: "I don't feel this relationship is right." If that fails and stupid Sam becomes violent, or even turns into a full-blown stalker, it's time to call the police: this is no longer a relationship but a crime.

(Dr Glenn Wilson is a reader in personality at King's College, London, adjunct professor at the University of Nevada and author of over 30 books on love, sex and compatibility.)

'I think that love is about recognising and being recognised at some profound level — it's about knowing and being known instinctively. I remember when I first met my husband, I walked into a room full of people and I suddenly saw this person I had never met before. But something strange happened in my gut — instantly I felt a strange familiarity. It was like: "Oh! There you are." The feeling was mutual. I think this is what literary tradition calls "love at first sight". I sometimes used to have to act this out when I was playing Shakespeare's heroines, and I could never quite believe in it and felt irritated with the playwright for making me play what I thought was really unplayable — a fantasy. But now I think I understand what he is dramatising. It is that intoxicating alchemy — the thrill of the new, charged with the intensity
of recognition'

JULIET STEVENSON,
actress

'It is curious that Christianity, which is founded on a direct experience of God's love, is often seen as strangling love by its prohibitions and commandments. That is a difficulty which many have today with the Church. Yet, as Pope Benedict XVI powerfully points out in his recent letter, Deus Caritas Est, not everything that looks and feels like love is love. The exhilaration of "divine madness" — the power of Eros, intoxicating and undisciplined — might be a foretaste of the real thing, but it needs to be purified. Reduced to pure sex, Eros becomes merely a commodity, to be used and exploited; the body lies when the heart is withheld. This is the experience of so many people today, and the cause of much modern misery. The church has 2,000 years of experience in purifying love; hence its commandments and prohibitions. Love is love when Eros unites with Agape, when it expresses our whole being: when the heart and spirit and mind move towards concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, but seeks the good of the beloved. Insofar as we become capable of real love, we move towards the origin of all love, which is God. Fortunately, in this, the greatest journey of all, we are not left to our own strengths: God gives us strength, gently encouraging us, with signs of sweetness and glimpses of what a love-filled world might look like'

CARDINAL MURPHY O'CONNOR