Anyman Dreams of Love Everlasting

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“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. In "The Old Man and the Sea," I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.”
—Ernest Hemingway, 1954.
Synopsis
To make love last forever is difficult for any man; for Richard Anyman, a bold and cosmopolitan, mid-40's gentleman, the task appears impossible. Crushed by the unexpected loss of his fiancee, he faces two inexorable facts: all games have winners and losers; and winning the game of love is never a foregone conclusion.

Only with help from three female friends does Anyman overcome his defeated inertia, move past his checkered track record with women, jettison his ignorance of the opposite sex and find not only his true identity, but also a renewed sense of finding lasting satisfaction in the arms of a new lover. Bedrock to his recovery is his self-imposed library study of the recorded history of love and romance, beginning with knighthood and courtly love in the 11th century. The startling twists and turns of humanity's cultural course through the Age of Romanticism to our present state of sensual affairs in the 21st century carry him forward and change his outlook on love and living.

When at rest in Central Park, Anyman daydreams. He is relieved to discover that not only he, but all of humanity has struggled with the vagaries of love and romance through different moralities. Yet, he cannot know from research and dreams alone that his lifelong, platonic friend, Carmela Eddington, suffered a gauntlet of sexual hardships and romantic liaisons arguably more difficult than his own.

Humanity's trials are mere context for Anyman and Eddington. Their friendship stands the test of time, but their future together is a great unknown when they realize that reaching for everlasting love means having to let go of accumulated fixed ideas and the long-term effects of past behavior. To be able to trust each other they must first learn what love really is, and then how to give love in order to receive it.

Anyman’s personal pathway from boyhood to manhood through puberty represents every man's journey, and traveling that road might or might not lead to the partnership he seeks.

Though Richard Anyman and Carmela Eddington come to us laden with emotional baggage and harsh memories, we hope as we travel with them that they will find happiness.

Truly, in the words of the philosopher Plato, “The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.”