Lessons Learned in Love

After being away from the blogging world for several years, I was recently reminded by a friend that this world was still in existance. When times get hoary, I lose my desire to write. The pressure seems so great sometimes that I have no language to describe my internal emotions, however strong they may be. So, I shut off and save my breath, waiting for a time when I finally have something to say.

Much has transpired in my life the last 2-3 years, and I've learned many valuable lessons that I would never trade, though the wounds in my heart are slow to heal. My desire these past two years was to learn what love is and what love does, but I found the outworking of it much harder than I ever anticipated. As I am forever the optimist, I thought I would make an immediate success of it. However, human weakness forever remains that uncalculated component in the equation.

Over the course of my life, I'd never been fully committed to anyone. Friends came and went. When they annoyed, I walked away and returned only when either I was less irritated or they had come to their senses and were willing to humor me and do things my way - because as we all know my way was the right way. To my great benefit and my greatest chagrin, I began dating someone who was not AT ALL like me. There were a few things, even foundational things, that we had in common. But, mostly, we were complete opposites. Yet, I still loved him. Where I was wide-eyed, passionate, and EXTRA emotional, he maintained a steady course in everything. One of the things that made me like him so much immediately was the way he looked at me the first time we actually went somewhere together. He was completely attentive, and it was like his eyes pierced through to my very soul and no one had EVER looked at me like that before...so engaged and enthralled with me. It was completely unnerving.

Surprisingly, our relationship ended with us still loving and valuing one another immensely. However, it was as we attempted to work through our vast differences that we encountered resistance in each other. Through this process, I discovered several things about myself and about love that I willingly admit placed a great pressure and strain upon our relationship.

1) Love accepts someone for who they are NOW, without expectation that they will ever change.

My ex-fiance taught me this. Women generally have a HUGE tendency to want to change the men they are with in order to mold them into a more suitable mate for themselves. I discovered how much men resent this. They want to be loved for who they are and they resist ALL attempts to make them more like the women they date, which is really what most women are trying to do. From what I experienced, they don't mind being told when something they do is hurtful to the woman he loves, but for the most part, if you don't want to be the cause of an identity crisis, leave the poor guy alone.

2) A relationship requires healthy boundaries for love to flourish.

Wow! This one was and still is a big one for me. I found us establishing what we thought were healthy boundaries regarding physical intimacy in the relationship's infancy due to our deep desire for purity. However, the closer we came to each other emotionally, the more we found ourselves crossing the established boundaries and then moving the line to a different, less restrictive location in order to compensate or make room for the new closeness we were experiencing. Unless two people completely respect one another, one or both persons will, in a moment of weakness, press the other for more, which can result in one of them feeling violated even if that ULTIMATE boundary was never crossed.

3) It is wisdom to retain a life outside of the relationship.

Co-dependency is DESTRUCTIVE!! I learned this first hand. I was VERY sick for the majority of our relationship, and spent ALOT of time in bed all by myself. Communication with the outside world was limited to what news I received from either the TV or my fiancé. I began to depend on him for more than what was reasonable, and found myself getting angry when he would have to leave me...and resentful because his visits would be so draining on my physical body that it would take me almost a week to recover. It became a most unforgiving, vicious cycle and I felt like the relationship had become a literal death camp for my soul. It got to the point that when he would talk about coming over I would cringe inside. Although I longed to see him, I KNEW the impact his visit would have on me physically and I hated it. He tried SO hard to make me feel comfortable around him, but I found it extremely difficult. We both feared that I was allergic to him because of the SORT of physical reactions I was having. I felt that my entire body was rebelling against the desire I had to be near him. Inevitably, I found that the more distance I had from him the better I felt and eventually, this served as a major cause of our separation. Since our separation, I am doing much better as evidenced by my ability to go out and invest more time into other friendships that were disrupted during those couple of years. I still am not strong. Emotional and physical disturbances weaken me greatly, so I need lots of rest. But, I am gaining in strength and trusting Jesus to restore EVERYTHING that has been stolen from me through my ignorance to the enemy's plans to destroy my life.

4) A commitment to solid communication and a desire to understand and be understood is vital to the health of a relationship.

I found it difficult to communicate my deepest feelings or convictions with my fiancé because inside I constantly felt emotional rejection. I knew that he wasn't rejecting me. I knew that he loved me. My mind, however, was convinced that if I shared what I REALLY felt, it would be too much for him to handle. I feared he would get angry with me or he would fight with me about it until I was so frazzled I would cry and simply surrender for the sake of keeping peace. Consequently, I stuffed A LOT of my true feelings inside and just tried to pretend there was nothing wrong. Of course, as you learn a person's rhythms, you also discover their internal defense mechanisms...and he learned mine really well. In many cases, when I finally shared what I was feeling, after a gentle but firm prodding on his part, he was so overjoyed that I opened up, he would just smile, hold me close, and sometimes kiss me on my forehead. That sort of transparency opened up a space for honest dialogue. After such occasions, I always felt closer to him than at any other time. In other cases, we really did duke it out, which left me hurt and silent, especially when I felt that he wasn't really taking me seriously or really trying to understand why I felt so strongly about a certain subject.

The day we broke up had me almost reconsidering my decision to end our relationship. The sort of honesty and vulnerability that had been severely lacking during the last few months of our relationship finally emerged and I felt connected to him in a way that I hadn't felt for a LONG time. However, our personal struggles would not have been solved by staying together. Separation seemed to be our only option and I can honestly say that "parting was such sweet sorrow".

5) Love is not inflexible.

Our relationships with others are in constant motion. They are always changing, growing, deepening, expanding. It is not rigid or inflexible. A locked heart is a heart that doesn't have the ability to experience true love. It doesn't involve anyone else in decision making processes because it cannot be diverted from its original course or distracted by someone else's needs. It is primarily self-centered. To be open to love is to be open to change; to value someone else's opinion other than your own; to go someone else's way rather than your own...or simply to make an attempt to meet the other half way. Unless we are taught the value of "sharing" in our youth, we will ultimately treat others as though we are the center of our own universe and all others revolve around us and must bend to our view of reality and our every whim. There are no "shared values" - no compromises that can be made in order to meet the other half way so as to retain a sense of one's own identity or core values while also giving value and worth to the other's identity and core values in the relationship. In my relationship, I was the inflexible one. In certain instances, I thought my inflexibility was supremely justified due to the context of the inflexibility...

The jury is still out on that one.