Hi love,
There’s something I want you to know. And when I say this, it might not make sense. Even though you will relate to it, the concept itself is so difficult to implement. Well, I won’t lie, it isn’t easy when you see it through your current lens. So I will present it in a way that helps you shift your perspective. I will show you through my own personal story. I will give you the short version here. The long version is a total love story I can share over hot chocolate one day.
Throughout most of my life, I have always had one best friend that I would walk life alongside. That one person I could walk into a crowded room and feel like a queen with. That one person I could call up in the middle of the night about boy drama. These friendships would last for a few years at a time ebbing and flowing with the natural waves of the mobile world. As we grew older, changed schools, went to college, landed our first jobs, moved cities, and got engaged, our relationships evolved. The evolution was more of a bell curve that an exponential curve. And for the longest time this would hurt me. I would get unnaturally close to someone, love their soul inside and out, walk with them through the struggles and celebrate the milestones until the milestone lead to a new phase of life. I would move, they would move, we would slowly grow apart. How could that be possible? We had spent years of our lives doing everything together. As I grew older, I started accepting this as the natural evolution of friendship. I started seeing life from a more evolved perspective coinciding with the natural impermanence of the world. I started to see life as a place for experimentation. For learning. For growth. Each of us is living our own journeys, experimenting through life. It took me a while to learn that everything is temporary, and sometimes people are put in your life for certain period of time during a certain phase. And that is okay. I now see friendships as a beautiful marriage of two souls coming together to love, expand and be in each others lives until the natural waves of life clash into new directions.
What I didn’t realize until recently was the beauty of applying this to romance. It’s an odd concept. Why would we look at romantic partners as impermanent? Isn’t that a waste of time? Well let me ask you this, have you ever felt that your best friend was a waste of time? If so, you are choosing the wrong friends. Every single person in your life met some sort of need for you, otherwise you wouldn’t spend the effort having them in your life. Two years ago, I switched my mentality from, “I am ready to meet my soulmate” to “I am open to whatever lessons I am meant to learn from whoever walks into my life.” I stopped desiring this magical love of my life. I stopped suffocating the idea of needing someone. I stopped trying to hold onto the idea of love so tightly. I allowed life to unfold naturally and I ended up falling in love. People say, love happens when you least expect it. That’s a simple way of explaining it. I say, life will give you what you want when stop expecting it to happen. When you state your desires and let go of the expectations attached to it. When you stop suffocating the air out of life and allow it to unfold in its own timing. The universe enjoys pleasantly surprising you -- so let it. As soon as I let go, I fell in love. Harder than I ever have before. It was totally unexpected. I didn’t even want a relationship, but life wanted to teach me one of the biggest lessons of all through this person. And it did. After the relationship I had an even greater perspective on relationships, attachment, and love. I saw them as a catalyst for growth and an incubator for connection and love. That relationship turned into a friendship and the healthy cycle of life continued. When I met my next love, I again was not looking. Over time, a friend turned into a lover. We came from a place of mutual unconditional love. Meaning we loved each other regardless of what the other person was feeling. We gave love like it was a gift. It didn’t matter if the person returned it or gave it to someone else. It was literally a gift. There was no expectation on the relationship. We talked through emotions like jealousy, possessiveness, discomfort, harmful attachment. Because at the end of it all, who we really need in life is ourselves. We don’t need anyone else to make us feel fulfilled. Each person brought into our lives is an expander, allowing us to tap into deeper self love.
A lover shouldn’t be expected to fulfill a list of 100 needs. How could one person possibly do that anyways? It’s crazy to get disappointed in someone for not living up to the defined image we set in our heads. The guy that has to be able to walk on fire, while feeding us strawberries, and confessing love from the rooftops. One person can’t do all of that. And they shouldn’t have to. It’s okay to let people flow into your life naturally. It’s okay to love without demanding love back. It’s okay to love without putting such a defined structure around the relationship. Eventually you will find the man that flows into your life naturally and you will love who he is, not for what he can bring you, but because you just truly love who he is. And your soft grip will allow for a beautifully natural unfolding of God’s greatest treasures of all. True unconditional unattached unstructured love.
Sending love,
C