The ‘l’ word – love – sanctions everything. ‘Love conquers everything’; ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’; love gives rise to any number of justifications, feeble excuses, lame hopes. I’ve certainly been there, done that and worn the T shirt. Then one day I got the point and burned the T shirt.
Love is… a feeling you have for and about another person. That other person may say that they love you too. Does that mean that your love is reciprocated?
What you believe is what you get. It’s the old story that what you focus on increases or becomes more present. It’s like the way you really notice teenage boys when you are a teenage girl and then when you get older and have different interests, they become invisible. I believed my entitlement was a bad relationship, and I got it.
The truth is that for many of us compromising on the partner we truly want and need has been all but soul-destroying.
We’d all like to be the ultimate authority on how best to live our own life. All too often we’re not; either because we have no ‘surrogates’ – by which I mean useful examples of people in successful relationships whom we can learn from – or because we have moronic surrogates, like Hollywood movies. It’s all too easy to get disoriented by feelings, emotions and self-doubt. ‘Life’ can be complicated sometimes.
Most times when we find life too complicated it is because we overlook the obvious, unpalatable truths.
The one simple law that holds for everyone is this: it can be as easy for you as it is for anyone else. You just have to believe it.
F. was understandably devastated by the breakdown of her relationship. She also felt incredibly foolish. In fact, she had never been stupid, or blind. She had not seen and had not known what made her partner a bad choice, because she had not been taught what to look for.
Harriet*’s face had been etched into a mask of anxiety and
pain by the years spent putting herself last while she tried to make bad
relationships work. She came up to me
on the last day of the course I’d been running on Domestic Violence Recovery to
tell me how far she had come along her journey.
Most people can’t get behind the wheel of a car for the
first time and drive away like a seasoned driver. But one or two can.
Most people can’t sit down at a piano for the first time
and play a Mozart sonata; although you might find the odd one or two who can
play whatever they hear by hear.Most […]
At some point, every one of us
has longed for that fuzzy ultimate feel-good sense of being regarded as the
perfect inhabitant of a perfect world by our perfect partner.
Whatever the problem is, love is
the answer. Love is all you need, after
all. Flimsy love stories still
impact on our psyche at the subliminal level, teaching us that […]
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