I have been trying to think all week about the least cheesy or cliche title to use about love for this post. It occurred to me that humans spend a lot of time of our existence trying to understand love or figure out what it means. Whether we have good examples of it or not, we all face challenges in trying to find the situation in our own lives which seem to fit that kind of example. What does it even mean?
I'm aware that I have had a lot of bad examples of what love means in my life. I'm aware that I was not even aware of this until adulthood when it led to dangerous situations in my life not being able to distinguish what love should not be. That started my personal journey. It began with recognizing patterns in my family which taught me that people who loved me did things like gaslight me and emotionally manipulative or abuse me. That was not a definition of pattern of love I wanted to continue or live with in my life.
Then how do you start to find or recognize something you have never witnessed or experienced yourself? You try to imagine something for yourself without any example. As I said even people who have some example then still run into the problem of not being able to find situations which align. How are any of us supposed to understand a good example if we are just trying to imagine it? There are a lot of other bad examples than the ones we personally have experienced out there.
If you are lucky, maybe someone comes along and a light shines and all of a sudden you think "oh wow. this is what is is supposed to be. now it all makes sense." And I mean LUCKY. It seems like you have to have incredible odds to overcome the statistical probabilities stacked against you to find that while you are hunting in the dark, with on real idea what it is you are supposed to find.
That kind of luck is the kind of lesson I intended to write about in this post, and that is why it has been such a big challenge to pick a title that doesn't smack of cliche or insicerity.
I know since I was a teenager I was always intrigued by the quiet tall ones - I was never drawn to the charistmatic ones trying to get attention. There was the one guy I hoped maybe would wait to reconnect with me as adults. Instead he did make that move. It just wasn't with me. Then I reconnected with my own version, but instead of doing as I had hoped, he ran around blaming me for why he didn't? Sounds complicated and it was.
For several months, I've been part of a group online where there was that one man. I tried to talk to him but he was shy, and it was always hard to start a conversation. I got to know a lot of other people in the group rather than him. I can say he and I were barely even friends. Sometime we would say hello, and it would be nice to chat more, but one or the other of us was about to leave, so we went for a few months like this, just never the right time to chat. Eventually a month or so ago we did have a little more time one on one. I learned he was latin, which kind of helped me understand some of his language, and connect the logic of some of his behavior.
However, none of that ever prepared me for the last few weeks or so. Two weeks ago I saw him online i this group, and we started chatting, and he completely opened his heart to me. It was so unbelievable, he was so deep and soulful in that moment. That was the start of our friendship, at least. But then last week turned out to be a lot, and I went online and did not even see him online, despite us being friends. Until I joined a group discussion, I wanted to make a plug for something was my only real purpose for joining, and that's when I saw him online. With the day I was having, following our deeper connection a few days before, I just thought "spending time with him would cheer me up."
Everything just continued to unfold, this beautiful person and connection. He would say I never really met him until that day, despite knowing each other for months. It was so surreal to me, to finally have this man I had wanted to know, chose me to open up to and want. We spent hours together talking about so many things, and I would just stop and pause and think "is this really real." I've never met anyone it was so easy to be around, and who made it so easy for me.
After a few of these online dates, he said he didn't want me to forget about him, and I confirmed for me, I wanted this relationship to be real, with him. He loves to sing at some online open mic events, and we both share a love and passion for music. I could picture our relationship unfolding, getting to be his groupie and follow him around fangirling over him like the doting girlfriend. It was even better than I had hoped. He sang songs from his heart about how he felt about me, and everything else just faded away.
The light went on finally. I thought I had met a lot of men I had begged or tried to convince that I deserved this, but here was this man doing it all so naturally. I never had to ask him to make me a priority. I never had to ask him to be so completely and purely emotionally open to me. He came ready to love me, there was no baggage, no avoidance, and no games. A lot of situations have made me feel hard to love, and when he stated exactly the opposite, it transformed me. I had never met anyone who just had this big love to pour on me, and my heart could not grow fast enough to be filled by the love he wanted to give.
"THAT'S how it should be," was the only comparison I could make. I told him that everyone word he said went straight to my heart, that he changed my life, and that it made me cry. This revelation - how are we ever supposed to find something like this if we have no idea how to imagine it? Because I've had so many bad examples of people using horrible definitions of what "love" is toward me, I've been trying to make up what I think I should find, but I have really had no idea. Someone had to teach me directly.
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