How do you look when you are unconditionally loved? have you ever seen it?
What if someone snapped a picture of you totally smothered and completely deeply in love with another person, and you saw in that picture the other person fully pledged, head over heart into loving you in return.
How would that change your perception of love, how would it reflect the kind of life you are living now?
Test yourself this week: Think back to a time or think to the future of when you will or did look this way. How did you or would you feel? What would change or stay the same in your life? How would this catapult you into a revelation for your life a piece that was stagnate, or how would it blossom into more of the same?
I've been challenging myself to do the same this past week, join me won't you?
Warning: this is a longer than normal post and possibly alot more personal and risky for me than usual, so settle in and hope you can gain some insights through this story as well :)
Here is the picture below of me immersed in loving another person so deeply the connection was almost painful, but a good pain. At the time, this man was amazing and fully completely loved me in return it was the perfect love, the ultimate connection. We were connected naturally in the spirit of greek gods, fate and kismet, rooted in the solid earth of our relationship ♥
the kink?... I believe I was too young to know how to flourish with it, make it mine and grow into it without fear of losing it. I became confused from the fear of my family history in that all 5 of the most influential relationships of my elders had all tried their hands at love, marriage, family and failed miserably. Thus ending in a string of divorces and not one positive relationship model to follow or look up to. I grew up protesting to everyone that I would never get married or live with anyone, ever. It looked and felt like it hurt an awful lot and as a child of a split family I subsequently also suffered the loss and pain behind a child's portion of divorce.
Yet I found this man, in another province, on a whimsical night out with friends with no agenda. Things and people come to you for a reason, and this man and relationship, us together, changed me forever. My girlish private fantasies of white weddings, loving long lasting marriages, building a family and home together were all rushed to the forefront of my mind and I felt changed. I felt hope, I felt I might actually get to be freed from the terrible destructive legacy my family was leading before me.
We lived together, quite happily I might add. We cooked and shopped for groceries on a Friday night and frolicked, tickled and snuck quick kisses, taps and pinches in the crackers and pickle aisles. We held hands, we respected each others differences and gave each other room to be ourselves and grow to become a beautiful "WE". We gravitated towards each other like magnets, it honestly was like another force was at play here. Something out of our control but completely meant to be like we were made for each other in another lifetime and had finally reached our point of return. I know that sounds movie like and hokey talk, but I am being very serious here. And if you are a reader who actually knows me personally, then you know that I am a deeply serious person who doesn't regularly speak of fiction to fluff up a story, it's just not my thing. I'm also not one to believe in such kinds of romances, so this truly turned me upside down and would become a model for the goal-relationship I would have for my future, when I could truly handle the intensity of it all and be immersed without fear or worry and just live. Time and experience has calmed and educated me on being centered and wise to this kind of love and now I welcome it fully prepared of it's massive positive influence for the well being of my future life.
How or why did it end? Well "we" came to a crossroads. My love proposed marriage, everything in my being wanted to just slip into a coma and be happily ever after with him. I said yes and then felt a little "off", I knew something just wasn't right for me in that moment. I started thinking about how I would be a wife and a mother and how that could be so soon from now, I panicked! I didn't have the confidence in myself to be that woman right then, immediately. Also harbouring the family fear of love destroyed by marriage I was horrified at the thought of loosing my love so soon, and at the height of our romance no less. We had a brief conversation over lunch just 20 minutes after the proposal, I didn't say the right thing, my love didn't hear the truly terrifying demons taking over my thoughts and he also didn't take the time to see me in that fearful place. This exacerbated both our positions following that day's events. My love was deeply hurt, feeling that I had rejected him, thinking I was rejecting our love and his place to be my forever protector and hero. That of course was NEVER the case, in fact it was the complete opposite. I think it was smart of me at just 23 yrs old to talk it out with him, to take time to think about the magnificence that was about to develop in our lives. I wanted it more than anything ever, now or then to be his everything to flourish our love and make babies and live like two old comfy house cats or loyal family dogs in the most pleasant of states forever more. Unfortunately that day that was to be momentous and beautiful turned into what became the slow death to our perfect love. I was crushed, he was crushed, I could see his pain but he could not see mine. I spent the better part of the next 10 months desperately trying to change the dynamic but instead just put myself in a more vulnerable and less attractive light. My love spent most of them firmly pressed heels into the ground on his view of the whole debacle, then many life changes for the negative came his way. Without the tools to manage the weight of all of that he crumbled, we crumbled, and with biased counsel I became convinced and influenced to finally let-go and end the relationship.
It was one of THE hardest things I had ever done in my life, to walk away from the one thing that had previously brought me so much deeply altering happiness and hope. At that time it wasn't such a happy place and we were struggling quite a bit in many areas due to the misunderstandings from 10 mths earlier that were never dissected or comprehended in the right arena. Our mutual respect had waned and although our connection remained, our love had been bleeding for far to long without proper tender care and neither of us had the tools to repair it ourselves without help or without each other on board at the same time.
It took years to try and pry ourselves from our deep connection. We still spent some time together off and on, we chatted alot on the phone, and often spoke of how we would have massive waves of thoughts of each other at the same time in different places, how psychic and spiritual. Time moved on, we spoke less and less, didn't see each other anymore and I finally moved away - a few provinces away, back to my hometown and settled in the city. My thoughts never waned from that magnificent love, I searched for that experience with many others after that but never found a match. Even in my marriage that kind of love never existed. I had children and marvelled at the irony of their looks resembling my old love. I lived in a loveless marriage and tried desperately to build the family life and marriage I had dreamt of with my old love but it never surfaced. It was a cold and lonely marriage, and I finally had to let it go as well, another deeply hurtful decision in my eyes and for the sake of my children. It was a terrifying place to be living my childhood pains through my children's eyes and my family histories replaying themselves.
I realised It was impossible to build what I wanted without the one person that I seemed connected and rooted to, so deeply out of my will. The moment I was set free from my cold loveless marriage I went on a search for my old love. Eventually taking out an ad in a local provincial newspaper, that a friend eventually passed on to him. It was a grand romantical gesture for sure, one reflective of our love past, one I thought was sure to spark a rekindled flame or at least a flash in the pan moment bringing us both to an understanding of the demise of our mistakes in the past. My old love contacted me by phone, I was thrilled to hear his voice again - we talked for 6 hours that day and lulled each other to sleep with our soft sleepy voices for days afterwards. It was like "the beginning" all over again. I felt I had to see him in person and him to spend some time with the new me to feel if the connection was not just in my head or in our voices over the phone. I booked a ticket as fast as I could gather some funds and rapidly made my way across the country to be with him. I was nervous about how he would perceive my new body, my new persona, but I knew that the basics of my being were as strong as their were 10 years prior when we first met. I had no conceived notions about how he would be and I didn't care about superficial things. I was certain he wouldn't look or be the same person he was back then but I heard in our many conversations before I landed that he and I STILL shared many of the same views and passions of our old love story and futures.
Things were a bit different this time around, in that we both had more experience, and life had thrown us curve balls, my love revealed he had a rare type of cancer and was taking treatments (chemo to be exact) to kill it senseless. What I didn't know was that it was also killing my love, in more ways than physically. I reached his apartment, he looked just as I remembered him and better with a little age to his body. His face and sparkling eyes however screamed of lifelessness and I found myself stricken with pain for him and his health situation. Please don't misinterpret my deep care and love for this man with pity or "feeling sorry for him" it was not that at all. I wanted to release him of all that pain, I wanted it to be me instead of him, with that I knew instantly my love still ran deep more than I recognised and I was clear that it wasn't a fantasy or just a childlike-young woman's 'puppy-love'. It was real deeply firmly rooted and had just hibernated with me stuffing it full of nonsense trying to convince myself I could be happy with another life without him just to survive. I could see the unhappiness in my eyes in the years without him, I wonder if he noticed?
We spent a wonderful weekend doing things out of the ordinary for both of us in our daily routines. Then we had to part ways - I was elated to have renewed our connection, but stricken with grief at the thought of being so far away from him and perhaps not having the chance to really see if this could flourish. I left with a promise to return in a week or two for a longer stay, I'm not sure he believed in that promise, but I did deliver. On my second trip it was light years from the first. The feelings of love and light were heavily erased by him and replaced with barrels of avoidance, anger, and more misinterpretations of my love for him. I realised one's love of self reflects how you feel loved by another, I saw his pain of his deteriorating health take over his feelings of worth again. I also recognized his love for another old love reach a boiling point. I saw him as me, as I was reaching out for a re-connection with him, he was reaching out for a re-connection with her. I knew it was not the right time for us or that we may never be at the right place and right time again as much as I wanted it.
I learned a lot from that relationship ~ love, hope, future, resilience, loss, re-building. It was the most influential relationship in my life, perhaps not for him, but for me, we will never know as I am not him. I do know that at the beginning he truly deeply unabashedly loved me through and through, and I know that because I've never felt it with another person, not even family, ever. I also know that I also loved him in the exact same way in return, whether he chose to believe it or not. He'd chide me back then, saying I didn't know what I felt, that I was too young and that I had a world to see before I could truly confirm to him that it was him that I loved. His demons and fears clearly told him he wasn't worth the love that I had for him and that did get in the way at times, but I'm certain I shut them up quite a few times - enough to see him through making a decision to make me his wife, mother of his children and loving partner for life with a proposal of marriage.
So in closing, I DO know what deep inspiring love looks like on me, it's in this picture and the memories of those days, weeks, months, years of connecting with this one man. If I never find it again, I am so happy that I was able to experience it at all and live to share this story with you and to my children when they too will find themselves confused by the many experiences of love and life.
These are the risks we take, - speaking the truth - (this was a big one for me, as he and others that know me closley may read this at some point) without these risks and truths we would be lifeless bodies, floating through the atmosphere of our lives not rooted in anything we partake in. And how limited would that be? No thank you.
May all your loves and risks be worthy of your experiential lives and may you find yourself rich with memories and stories with life lessons to pass forward for generations behind you. xo
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