Meditation for June 28th, 2016
How to Fall in Love and Not Get Screwed
A lot of people write me letters about how they can find somebody and fall in love. They ask because they think that there has to be some kind of recipe for dating, love, marriage, family, growing old and dying at the same time holding hands. They write letters because the whole world promises love. They want to know how they can find this soul mate they were promised. They write because they are alone.
I have fallen in love. I have fallen in love and have been screwed. I have walked away completely skinned alive under the harsh hot sun. I sat in my dark cool room thinking about how I will never fall in love again. Not because I am so hurt that I don’t want to ever go through that again, but because I just don’t see the possibility ever happening again.
I have fallen in love and I haven’t been screwed. I have walked away skinned alive under the harsh hot sun, but not from my ex’s doing, but just the pain of loving someone and it not working out.
I am in love right now. Gosh, I am in love. Today is the one-year anniversary of her and I going from basically strangers to the most emotionally intimate relationship I have ever had. I love that I am in love not because I think being in love is better than not being in love, but because of the person I am in love with. We don’t complete each other; we work to complete each other.
The only way I can really tell you how to fall in love is to tell my own story of falling in love. I will break it up into the many “stages” of a relationship.
Infatuation
I had been single for a while and tried dating a few times, but I was getting over being very ill and I had been waiting on some health news that would dictate more or less the rest of my life. I was only half-interested in meeting someone for a relationship.
I saw this woman who was funny, smart, creative and beautiful hanging out with some mutual friends. My one friend said that she seemed smitten with me, so I spent that night Internet stalking her. To be honest, I thought she might be too ‘cool’ for me, but she was always super nice to me.
One night we were all standing outside of a late night diner and we were all doing the funny thing and she and I were a comedic match made in heaven. She bounced my humor back to me like we were an old radio comedy duo.
I was smitten.
Now, I have no qualms asking a person out, but it is really boring to ask someone out, so I ran into her, and without a nary a plan, I asked if she’d like to swim at my parents house with me, with other people of course.
She said yes.
I of course spent that night in a dizzy dream state.
Then I invited other people a few days later and then we had a small group heading to my parents house to swim. She ended up spending the night and we stayed up all night talking.
Just like all love stories.
The Tour
We hardly knew each other when we first started dating. We had to spend some time getting to know each other. We would spend all day and night talking and sharing our lives up to that point with each other. I was freaked out. She was probably freaked out, but we were feeling pretty intense for each other.
We just spent every day with each other. We would go on adventures all over Oregon, swimming, looking at nature.
Everything she did was magical, beautiful and amazing. I was truly smitten.
And she was very smitten with me. We just go along. We were both weird and crazy in similar ways and we were weird and crazy in different and interesting ways.
Disturbance of the Force
We had fallen in love, but now we had skated by the honeymoon period. This is the make or break for a lot of couples. We had hit some walls with some of our figuring each other out. We would miscommunicate. We had to get used to the darker hours of each other’s lives. We had to learn to talk and listen to each other.
This is why I know we loved each other because of the work we both did to figure out the solution instead of blaming each other and or walking away.
We had hit that mark where people get surprised by the idea of relationships take work. We were willing to do the work – even if it sucked and hurt.
The Rut
This is when you and your partner figure out a method to your weekly lives. The issue with her and I was I had just been sick for a year and a half and the first little part of us hanging out, I was only working 18 to 22 hours a week. Then I had to go full time and early as fuck in the morning. This cut some of the adventure and freedom summer we had just enjoyed.
This also allowed us to survey each other in reality and not under the summer sun’s magic beams. We had to get used to me going to bed early and waking up early. She had to be awake while I slept. This needed a Rut or a strong schedule.
We started to form opinions on each other’s lives. We started seeing the true us and how we dealt with life. We had no armor when we got so used to the other just being there. We were again faced with work.
Mold
We took all the information we learned from the other and molded our lives to each other because we are in love and we want to be with each other. We don’t want to have a relationship work for ego, we don’t want to be better than anyone else, we just want to be with each other and we understand that some of that requires compromise.
We couldn’t help but to be excited about the future. We have dreams, goals and wishes for us in the future. We can realize those ideals if we work for them. We share goals. We support the goals we don’t share.
We want the other to be the best.
We molded because we fit.
The Post Acute Withdrawal Happies
After a couple goes through some reality, they hit another happy place. We hit this more recently. We have some issues that I believe will work out, but we just both have to work and be patient with the other. Love isn’t easy.
When I leave her in the morning, I make sure I kiss her, tell her I love her and give her butt a squeeze. Every time I leave her, my heart lurches. I walk away in love. I know that I can sometimes be so self-absorbed and depressed to affectionately show that, but I do not want to imagine life without her.
The Future
I am moving in with her in September. I do not take moving in with a partner lightly. I want it to be with someone that I share goals with and that I feel like we have a long future ahead of us. With her, I do.
I take building a future very seriously. I believe in taking time, molding and seeing where each other’s idea of the future looks like.
She and I want the same thing, a home. A place that we can build our own traditions and rituals. A place that we can share with loved ones and animals. We want a home that is love, compassion and passion under a roof. We want a long loving future with each other.
Love
I love her. I sometimes stare out the window at work and picture her cruising around in her Kia running all the errands she seems to have each day. I picture her wild black hair with silver streaks. I picture her little bow of a mouth drawn to resemble whatever she is thinking about, her mouth gives her away more than her eyes, her mouth betrays her. Her moth is what gave her away that she loved me before she even said it. Her mouth has a laugh loaded and ready when she is happy.
I picture her jerky movements as she is probably looking for something. It isn’t lost, it is near by, but she jerk her head around looking for the misplaced thing and she animatedly pats down her body to see if any pocket has it.
She is beautiful. She has the olive skin and dark green eyes that I picture my lost relatives in Sicily falling in love with. I picture her and I on a beach in Sicily under the tan stones of an ancient castle looking south at Africa across the Mediterranean. We stare at the clouds of dust rising from the Sahara. We smell the oldest of all the worlds known and we shrug our shoulders and jump into the sea.
I miss her when she isn’t around. I like just being in the same room as her. I like being in the same social group as her. I love making her laugh and I love hearing her laugh at my jokes. O how I love her laughing at my jokes.
She inspires me. I want to be her artist. I want to be her poet and her writer. I want to be her inspiration too. I want her to feel like she can do anything she wants with me by her side.
I love her.
She is a gift. She is a goddess who makes the mysterious understandable. She is a witch, and I love her for being a witch even if she keeps saying she isn’t a witch, but she is from Massachusetts and owns a witch pointy hat, so she has to be a witch. That will explain this spell I am under. This spell that I feel this kind of love for someone. I don’t want the present day to go by too fast, but I am so excited for what the future will bring us.
She is so beautiful. She lights my day up with her smoky voice and her passions. She is remarkable when she is curious. Yesterday I bemoaned people that weren’t curious, but my girl is curious. She is thirsty for knowledge. I learn from her. She is a teacher. She is comfort and a sage.
I don’t want to live in a world without her. I don’t mean that suicidal or possessively, I just think that the world would suffer for it if she weren’t in it. She lights up any room I have seen her in. I know that she brightens other people’s lives up too.
She makes me happy. In the end, she is in my life, I am happy. I feel so ok with her by my side.
I hope she feels half the love I feel for her.
That was so beautiful, and touching. Thank you. Good job being brave with your soul.