Happily Ever After, 1 +1 = 2
Originally published at Lane Ellen. You can comment here or there.
I don’t think I need to go into fabulous detail about how amazing my partner is. He’s sensitive, accomplished, self-assured, intelligent, and so much more. Those of you who know him already know these things about him. Those of you who don’t will have to take my word for it.
We’re celebrating a one year anniversary soon (it’s not actually a year yet, but it is the day we’ve chosen to celebrate it.) In commemoration of that, I want to delve into some deep stuff. You know, because every anniversary needs something to test it. Err…something.
Once upon a time, I used to think that in relationships, 1+1 should equal 1. Combined souls, if you will. All that dramatic mumbo-jumbo. And for some reason, the more I lost myself, the more I felt I couldn’t live without someone, the more I felt I was in love with them. This to me was the definition of soul mate: someone else you lost yourself in, found it hard to be without. I would go into great depths of fear and self-loathing if I did not live up to my love’s needs or expectations, and then do whatever it takes to make amends.
You cleave to that person, as one might read in a Victorian novel. Cleave, however, shouldn’t mean CLING, even though that is what it really becomes.
As you can imagine, that causes no end of problems, especially when one wakes up to the fact that in losing themselves, they lose the other person. The relationship fails, blame is cast, people are taken advantage of because they aren’t really themselves. You get out of what has become a bad relationship, feeling strong in your recovered self, but weak and lonely.
But it is a habit that is hard to break. When falling in love feels like falling down, other feelings of love seem foreign and somehow not enough. You no longer understand - if you ever did - what a healthy loving relationship feels like. So you doubt and question, and since you are already hurt, you are even more defensive.
This is something I battle with all the time. Because, for the first time in my experience of relationships, I feel like a whole person. I have an experience of not being lost, not being helpless without my partner. And because I am not used to being a whole person, because I am not used to this full experience of me, I am often conflicted.
Somehow, it does seem right, but is right. Feels right. But the part of my brain that has memorized the relationship process keeps saying, “Wait wait…you still feel whole. Something isn’t right.”
Because the only time I had felt whole was when I was on my own. So if I am whole still, then I must not feel utterly bound to someone else. The analyzing brain reads this as not being truly in love.
But I am in love - madly, truly and wholly.
I am retraining my brain to understand what I feel and know is right:
- That one does not need a person to complete you, but a person that allows you to be complete on your own.
- That feeling separate as a being does not requires separateness from others.
- That one does not need to lose oneself in order to be a part of someone else.
- That “wanting” to be with someone is much more meaningful than “needing” to be with someone.
I can be whole and separate, yet connected with someone else for a joint purpose: love.
If I was powerful as half a loving person, imagine what I can do as a whole loving person! And indeed, as a whole loving person, I have made connections with others greater than I have ever been able to achieve in the past.
We are more powerful together as whole loving people.
1+1=1 is an error. 1+1=2 . The math finally works.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Let it rather be a moving sea between
the shores of your souls.
-Khalil Gibran, The Prophet