On love

This quote stayed with me this past week:

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.

Heidi Priebe

So many of us believe that deciding to take the step and formalize a relationship is the hardest one. What I have come to understand and read so clearly in this quote is that this step is one of the easiest parts.

It is a much harder and vulnerable affair to embark on a discovery of what makes the person in front of us the one. The one alongside whom we get to face one of the very few certainties of life: change. The change in us and the change in them.

Close to my fifth decade of life it makes me smile (ok, and sometimes cry) when I hear people say things like “you’ve changed so much, you’re no longer the person I used to know.” or “we will never change, we will always feel this way about each other.” or “I wish we could go back to the way things were.”

Impermanence is a lesson I have learned to accept bitterly and reluctantly. Living with the nostalgia or fear of yesterday and the anxiety or hope of a tomorrow I can only wish is something I can live with, I realize that it is only in a mindfully attended present that I can spot the signs of meant to be and together forever. And these signs have nothing to do with wealth, looks or fame.

It seems to me this is an exercise easier done in retrospect (aren’t they all?). Looking back to almost 12 years ago, I realize that it was committed love, kindness and smarts that convinced me she was the one. She is not the same person I fell inlove with. And that is actually refreshing. A few more wrinkles later, some whiter hair to prove the passage of time, wiser, less patient at times, she remains the same loving, committed, kind and smart human I get to fall inlove with over and over again.

I am lucky and I realize not everyone is. Relationship-wise I have been in different spaces in my life. Long enough to understand that love also means being honest about your choice being a mistake and deciding that it is more loving and freeing to part ways. Love is never coercion. “I’ve known you to be a certain way, you’ve gone ahead and changed and I can’t stand that. Therefore, you need to go back to what used to be.”

Long ago, someone told me that relationships must be much more like Hs and less like As: each of us, on our journeys, connected. Not depending on each other to the point where one of us caves.

Photo by bhuvanesh gupta on Unsplash