Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Seriously Purple Prose...





Love is elusive for me.

Always has been.

I fell in love for the first time at the age of 21. The preceding years of my life had been mostly a panic that no one would ever find me attractive. I had a romantic's heart coupled with a completely nerdy, homebody life-I was as shy as could be, I rarely spoke to anyone in the four years that I was in college (my professors being the one exception), and all I wanted in life was to be swept off my feet by some boy who could get past all of my awkwardness and see that Cinderella underneath.

All of that happened. Which is amazing. But true.

So, when my marriage crumbled at my feet, my natural inclination was to panic again. After all, it had taken 21 years for someone to succumb to my awkward charms the first time. Now I was older and grayer and still ill at ease in most social situations.

I have wavered in the past two years between being completely certain that I will never fall in love again, and being completely certain that I absolutely must fall in love again for any of this to make any sense. After all, I tend to reason with myself, surely this happened because the true love of my life is still out there, making his way to me? Sure, we both got waylaid, me by a marriage and children-so heaven knows what could be holding him up? Family, distance, maybe he's been mauled by tigers in India-literally anything.

And then of course I waver back to the understanding that I have with my brain, that I am never going to fall in love again, and that I am going to just shut down that part of my being, and therefore I need never again live through the agony of being abandoned by someone that I trust with my life.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle.

I have grown fond of saying, "I'm open to falling in love again, but I'm not looking for it."

That's, of course, easier said than done. What on earth does that mean? I think that I want it to mean that I totally want to fall in love but I don't want to do anything that might suggest I lay my feelings on the table to be hurt. It's not possible. I can't only have all of the upside of being in love without any of the possible negative consequences.

My head and my heart are battling it out to see who wins this fight.

What is my point with this particular post? Well, someone just recently asked me how it's possible to figure out when is the correct time to start dating again? (I know, it scares me too, that there may be people in the world who think I have actual insight into these things, as if I have any idea what I'm doing.) My answer for that is for me, figuring out if I want to go out with someone, if it's worth my time or, more importantly, if it's worth whatever sliver of my heart might go with it, it's a very organic process. I have figured out that I really have to get to know a person, and for me, that is done in real life and not over the internet. (Mind you, I know people who have met their spouses on the internet and they are perfectly suited. So I'm not saying it can't work, it just doesn't for me right now.)

I'm just a bit too damaged to trust anyone very easily. It complicates things a bit.

Figuring out the pieces of me that remain from this divorce has been such a time consuming process. So even though I do worry endlessly about falling in love again, and how it would work, and what it would look like on a practical level, ultimately none of that matters.

What matters in the end is that I'm content with who I am, in love or not.

Two years ago, at our Christmas Eve service, all I could think was that there was a huge hole where Nick belonged, that the girls and I would feel the loss of his presence forever. How would I ever just move beyond Nick? And this year I had a realization that our family has changed and morphed to the point that it no longer feels like someone is missing.

It's a sign that this dented, damaged heart of mine is healing.

"Every word, every lover's sign we make has been made before."
-The Lover Speaks

No comments:

Post a Comment