grounds for true love

Love is the only thing we can count on.

We all know the feeling. We meet, we connect, we fall in love. When we’re in it our world is turned upside down. We’d rather be with our beloved than eat, sleep, or work. We feel on top of the world when our love is returned and crash to the depths if it looks like our love is threatened.

Lust is connected with romance. We want to merge our bodies, minds, and spirits. Orgasmic intensity isn’t just about pleasure. It’s about wanting to share our hearts, souls, atoms, and electrons. We want to lose ourselves and find the divine.

We no longer feel alone. We are now part of a pair. We feel the power of two and joy of being us. We’re still in the world, but the world seems like the background. We two are the center and the world is there to support and embrace us.

The primal creation, the reason we are each here, is that a man and a woman came together and an intrepid sperm was welcomed by wondrous egg and we were launched into life. But in a world with too many people, we also create art, music, home, healing, and other gifts for humankind.

The honeymoon time comes to an end. Disillusionment sets in. Our partner seems to change. They are not who we thought they were and they aren’t giving us what we longed to have. We wonder if we’ve made a mistake and begin turning away and looking for what is missing.

 

Incompatibility is grounds for true love. When we become disillusioned with our partner, we often feel we’ve become incompatible. But when we recognize that disillusionment can mean letting go of illusions, we can also let go of believing that incompatibility is a bad thing. It actually allows us to learn where our wounds have been hiding.

In looking away from our partner, we are forced to look within. We feel the pain of the trauma we all experience growing up in families that didn’t adequately meet our needs. We recognize that we were hoping that our partner would make us whole. We were looking in all the wrong places.

Everyone gets sick, but that’s not a bad thing. Sickness can be our greatest teacher, our greatest guide. Depression, anxiety, diabetes, deep vein thrombosis, heart attack. . .any health challenge can be a teacher, draw lovers closer. Embrace illness when it comes and love your partner through sickness and health.

Being real is not sweetness and light. It is passionate, painful, and creative. Much like making a baby and giving birth. Being real requires being part of a pair. Self-actualization is not something we do by ourselves.

All our unhappiness and illnesses are fear based. We’re afraid of losing what we have or not getting what we need. We always have two choices. Do we feed the fear or do we feed the love? Whichever one we feed gets stronger.

Real, lasting love is something we create every minute of every day. It’s the most difficult thing we do in our lives. It is also the simplest. But simple isn’t always easy. Learning to love is the graduate school of life. Admission is free, but will cost you everything you have. Are you ready for the journey?

This edited essay was published on www.MenAlive.com. Check out the site if this interested you.