I'll Stay With You One Year

The light-hearted music of this song caught my attention long before it became a part of a musical memory for me.  It's lyrics were pretty forward thinking for the time that it first came out.  The age of flower power and free love was just coming into its own back then.  The concept of a female promising a year of sunshine and love then moving on was pretty radical.  Still the seed was planted in my mind.

In late 1968 its words came back to memory and I implemented my own version of the one year promise.  I was newly divorced and dating a gorgeous hunk of blond male who had been divorced for eight years.  Though his son and daughter still lived with his ex-wife he saw them on a regular basis and it didn't take long for me to fall in love with them and vice versa.  He seemed to sincerely care about me as well, but there was trouble in paradise, as they say.

First, because of an exceptionally bad marriage he had vowed to never marry again.  Secondly, he had lost his high paying job to the boss's nephew and was more than a little resentful.  That wouldn't have been a major problem had he been seriously looking for work--he wasn't.  It was like he was having a mid-life crisis in his early thirties.  Slowly, but surely his world was coming unraveled and he seemed oblivious to it all.  When I could take no more I promised him I would give him one year to straighten out.  If nothing changed for the better in that time I would leave no matter how I felt about him. 

It broke my heart at the time, but one year to the day he still didn't have a job and was no closer to rethinking his attitude towards marriage so I walked out of his life forever.  Though it wasn't as easy as it sounds, I kept my promise.  It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life for me and him.

From a mutual friend I later learned that my leaving really shook him up.  He straightened out, got a job, and found a woman that he married.  I made a lot of false starts after that, but two years later I found a wonderful man as well--him I gave thirty-three years of my life to before he passed away.

Just recently I was flipping through radio stations on XM and heard this song and I smiled with rememberance of the radical lyrics that made a difference to me.