I do not know where to begin so welcome to the middle :)
I have to write this because it's on my mind and my mind will burst. It is high time to got back into writing and for once I feel like I have things to write about.
I am so happy.
I have a home. I have a job. I have a good life. I have learned so many lessons. I have realized so many mistakes I have made. I am not married anymore. I will write another time about the ending of my marriage perhaps, but not today. Today I've been thinking a lot about my current relationship and what I intend to do right this time around that I failed to do in my last one.
I am in a relationship with a wonderful man.
I was thinking today that if someone were to ask me if I thought we were meant to be, what would I say? I've always been a big fan of fate and past lives and destiny and astrological phenomenon. I've always chased the notion that love could be at first sight or meant to be or written in the stars. But I think if you were to ask me about my love and whether he and I were meant to be, I would have to tell you, no. Not only do I believe we are not meant to be, I believe we are in fact not meant to be.
Allow me to explain.
The notion of something that is meant to be, to me, is something that no matter what you do, it'll happen. You can't fight it and you can't run from it. That is not what we have.
What we have is something we've chosen. And it was not a decision we take lightly. It was a very difficult decision. You see, we both come from places of great pain. This relationship that we have, this thing, was a conscious and deliberate decision. And it remains that way. Every day. It must in order to survive.
I've learned from my past mistakes that a good relationship must be deliberate. It is a project two people embark on, and it must be their passion to see it succeed. Think of it like it's a living and breathing entity. It must be nurtured and nourished and protected from all that threaten it.
I did not nurture my marriage. If anything, I watched it die. I starved it to death. If I'd known then what I know now, and by "then" I mean the days before irreparable damage had occurred, I might have been able to salvage it. But I didn't. I approached it like I approached all my relationships in the past. Like a train ride that I was a passenger on. I was never driving. I was never in control. I never offered directions. And in the end, I was so exhausted of the direction we were heading in, right off a cliff, that I did finally take control of the engine in that I just put it in full speed. Right into that ravine.
It's very sad when you think about it.
That was years ago today, and I'm relieved to say that my exhusband, or coparent as I prefer to call him, and I are on good terms. We're friends. We're family. It's ok. I don't regret those years. I learned a lot from that crash.
I learned how to treat my relationships, not just how to treat the people I am in them with. You can treat your partner wonderfully and still not be a good partner. Let me repeat that again because we write what we need to read. You can treat your partner very well and still not be a good partner. You can love your partner with all your heart, but that is not enough reason to be with them.
There are two parts, I feel, to being a good partner. Treating your partner well is one. The other is nurturing the relationship. How do you do those things?
Here's what I've learned in my 37 and a half years. Patience is key when it comes to people. I have a partner who has mastered the art of hiding. He hides in plain sight. He's a ninja. It's remarkable, really. Is that you, my love? Or just a brilliant disguise? He only comes out when it's safe. I didn't know this about myself until I met him, but I do the same thing.
I've learned that you have to approach your other with patience and compassion in all circumstances. Honest compassion. Not the kind where you sound nice but deep down you harbor secret resentment. That's how you crash and burn. I raise him up like the king that he is. I say to him what I want to hear.
These things are so important that I wrote them down in my dream journal. Yes, I have a dream journal. No, you may not read it.
I do not take you for granted.
You are very important to me.
You are an important part of my life.
I am not ashamed of our story.
I am not ashamed of you.
I am proud to say I know you.
I am proud to say I am dating you.
I want to keep doing this.
I like when you talk to me.
I want you to feel loved.
I want you to feel safe and secure with me.
I am not going anywhere.
I want to be with you.
I love you.
I'm good with my words and I use them to build him up because I believe in him and I believe in this thing that we have. Besides my words I also practice patience by giving him his space. His space is sacred to him. He doesn't even realize it. We've never discussed it. It's one of those things I had to figure out from years of knowing him. Space not given will only end up as space taken. I give it freely and in return I'm allowed into the labyrinth of his world. Never met a man with so many walls. Rather, I've never realized a person could have so many walls. I may have in fact met plenty of people with many more walls, but I never attempted to date any of them.
The interesting thing was realizing, when I became comfortable letting him have his space, I was suddenly so relieved to have space of my own.
We worked so hard to get here. All those walls, he's got his trust issues. It took quite a bit of bravery to let me in. I have my own issues. I've been continuously told all my life to tone myself down. I needed to trust him enough to let him see me as I am. And not just that, and we come to part about nurturing the relationship, I needed to trust him enough to tell him when he has done something wrong.
This is the scary part. I have always been a failure at confrontation, and I am even worse at expressing myself verbally or defending my thoughts in conversation without writing everything down, rehearsing, organizing my thoughts, fleshing out arguments... I just as soon walk away and give up. I don't fight. But when you don't fight for your happiness in your relationship, you are not fighting for your relationship to succeed.
I'll repeat that, again for myself. If you don't fight for your own happiness in your relationship, you are not fighting for your relationship to succeed. I need to be able to go to him and say, this thing makes me unhappy, help me fix it so we can be better. If I feel I can't do that, then what am I doing with this person? I need to not only be brave enough to advocate for myself and for my relationship, I need to trust him enough that I can open up to him and he won't run away or get angry with me or get defensive with me.
He needs to see that when I'm coming to him with a relationship issue that he bears some fault with, it is because I want the relationship to succeed.
And as he tells me time and time again, "If you don't tell me what's wrong, I can't fix it." That's powerful. For a person with very little relationship experience, that's insightful. Really it's not as simple as it sounds.
What we have is very good. We both build each other up. We are each other's advocates. We are supportive. We are patient. We are kind. When I am with him I feel nourished. I feel appreciated. I feel valued. When we are apart I feel mostly confident. When I don't, I tell him. I'm not going to sit here and lie and say it's perfect. It's not. Perfect things are done. They're complete and finished. This is not. It is ongoing. It requires work constantly and every day.
We are not meant to be. We are meant to fail. This is not a train ride. This is a ship on the ocean. We choose the direction. We find our wind. We fight every day to keep it afloat. That's how it works.
We have to fight each day like there are unseen forces working to sink us. You have to protect your relationship like it's made of porcelain. You have to nurture it like it's a garden. One tip I'm glad I heard before we started this thing was not to ever talk bad about your partner to anyone. I used to know a lot of married women in their 30s when I was in my 20s and their favorite thing was to sit around and vent about their husbands. You can't do that.
When you complain about your other, the person you complain to, who is likely a good friend, will not understand when you forgive your partner the way that you do because they do not love them the way that you do. They will remember every bad thing you tell them about your sweetheart. Eventually, they'll interrupt your venting with, why are you still with this person? This isn't a thought you need to let invade your mind. But when you place the issues of your relationship outward, you open the door to the influx of invasive thoughts and opinions that don't belong. Keep your relationship issues within your relationship. When you talk about your partner, only build them up.
I started practicing this when we started dating and even more so when we started dating seriously, and it's been a blessing. Issues that I would normally run to my girlfriends with, I run to him with. We discuss them, solve them, and move on. It's good. It's not easy, but it's good. It's terrifying, but it's good. In the end, the day to day stresses that we deal with between the two of us are nobody's business but ours. And the act of addressing and solving those issues is how we build our relationship. It is how we repair our ship.
They tell you relationships are a lot of work, but they never tell you what exactly the work entails. I'm glad I started to figure it out before we started this thing. Build up your partner to themselves and to other people. Advocate for yourself and for your relationship. Have patience and compassion.
Knowing that we are both doing these things, I can say with confidence that should we sink, should this ship go down, I know that we went down fighting. And really that's the best I could hope for. That is our happy ending.
I am so happy.
I have a home. I have a job. I have a good life. I have learned so many lessons. I have realized so many mistakes I have made. I am not married anymore. I will write another time about the ending of my marriage perhaps, but not today. Today I've been thinking a lot about my current relationship and what I intend to do right this time around that I failed to do in my last one.
I am in a relationship with a wonderful man.
I was thinking today that if someone were to ask me if I thought we were meant to be, what would I say? I've always been a big fan of fate and past lives and destiny and astrological phenomenon. I've always chased the notion that love could be at first sight or meant to be or written in the stars. But I think if you were to ask me about my love and whether he and I were meant to be, I would have to tell you, no. Not only do I believe we are not meant to be, I believe we are in fact not meant to be.
Allow me to explain.
The notion of something that is meant to be, to me, is something that no matter what you do, it'll happen. You can't fight it and you can't run from it. That is not what we have.
What we have is something we've chosen. And it was not a decision we take lightly. It was a very difficult decision. You see, we both come from places of great pain. This relationship that we have, this thing, was a conscious and deliberate decision. And it remains that way. Every day. It must in order to survive.
I've learned from my past mistakes that a good relationship must be deliberate. It is a project two people embark on, and it must be their passion to see it succeed. Think of it like it's a living and breathing entity. It must be nurtured and nourished and protected from all that threaten it.
I did not nurture my marriage. If anything, I watched it die. I starved it to death. If I'd known then what I know now, and by "then" I mean the days before irreparable damage had occurred, I might have been able to salvage it. But I didn't. I approached it like I approached all my relationships in the past. Like a train ride that I was a passenger on. I was never driving. I was never in control. I never offered directions. And in the end, I was so exhausted of the direction we were heading in, right off a cliff, that I did finally take control of the engine in that I just put it in full speed. Right into that ravine.
It's very sad when you think about it.
That was years ago today, and I'm relieved to say that my exhusband, or coparent as I prefer to call him, and I are on good terms. We're friends. We're family. It's ok. I don't regret those years. I learned a lot from that crash.
I learned how to treat my relationships, not just how to treat the people I am in them with. You can treat your partner wonderfully and still not be a good partner. Let me repeat that again because we write what we need to read. You can treat your partner very well and still not be a good partner. You can love your partner with all your heart, but that is not enough reason to be with them.
There are two parts, I feel, to being a good partner. Treating your partner well is one. The other is nurturing the relationship. How do you do those things?
Here's what I've learned in my 37 and a half years. Patience is key when it comes to people. I have a partner who has mastered the art of hiding. He hides in plain sight. He's a ninja. It's remarkable, really. Is that you, my love? Or just a brilliant disguise? He only comes out when it's safe. I didn't know this about myself until I met him, but I do the same thing.
I've learned that you have to approach your other with patience and compassion in all circumstances. Honest compassion. Not the kind where you sound nice but deep down you harbor secret resentment. That's how you crash and burn. I raise him up like the king that he is. I say to him what I want to hear.
These things are so important that I wrote them down in my dream journal. Yes, I have a dream journal. No, you may not read it.
I do not take you for granted.
You are very important to me.
You are an important part of my life.
I am not ashamed of our story.
I am not ashamed of you.
I am proud to say I know you.
I am proud to say I am dating you.
I want to keep doing this.
I like when you talk to me.
I want you to feel loved.
I want you to feel safe and secure with me.
I am not going anywhere.
I want to be with you.
I love you.
I'm good with my words and I use them to build him up because I believe in him and I believe in this thing that we have. Besides my words I also practice patience by giving him his space. His space is sacred to him. He doesn't even realize it. We've never discussed it. It's one of those things I had to figure out from years of knowing him. Space not given will only end up as space taken. I give it freely and in return I'm allowed into the labyrinth of his world. Never met a man with so many walls. Rather, I've never realized a person could have so many walls. I may have in fact met plenty of people with many more walls, but I never attempted to date any of them.
The interesting thing was realizing, when I became comfortable letting him have his space, I was suddenly so relieved to have space of my own.
We worked so hard to get here. All those walls, he's got his trust issues. It took quite a bit of bravery to let me in. I have my own issues. I've been continuously told all my life to tone myself down. I needed to trust him enough to let him see me as I am. And not just that, and we come to part about nurturing the relationship, I needed to trust him enough to tell him when he has done something wrong.
This is the scary part. I have always been a failure at confrontation, and I am even worse at expressing myself verbally or defending my thoughts in conversation without writing everything down, rehearsing, organizing my thoughts, fleshing out arguments... I just as soon walk away and give up. I don't fight. But when you don't fight for your happiness in your relationship, you are not fighting for your relationship to succeed.
I'll repeat that, again for myself. If you don't fight for your own happiness in your relationship, you are not fighting for your relationship to succeed. I need to be able to go to him and say, this thing makes me unhappy, help me fix it so we can be better. If I feel I can't do that, then what am I doing with this person? I need to not only be brave enough to advocate for myself and for my relationship, I need to trust him enough that I can open up to him and he won't run away or get angry with me or get defensive with me.
He needs to see that when I'm coming to him with a relationship issue that he bears some fault with, it is because I want the relationship to succeed.
And as he tells me time and time again, "If you don't tell me what's wrong, I can't fix it." That's powerful. For a person with very little relationship experience, that's insightful. Really it's not as simple as it sounds.
What we have is very good. We both build each other up. We are each other's advocates. We are supportive. We are patient. We are kind. When I am with him I feel nourished. I feel appreciated. I feel valued. When we are apart I feel mostly confident. When I don't, I tell him. I'm not going to sit here and lie and say it's perfect. It's not. Perfect things are done. They're complete and finished. This is not. It is ongoing. It requires work constantly and every day.
We are not meant to be. We are meant to fail. This is not a train ride. This is a ship on the ocean. We choose the direction. We find our wind. We fight every day to keep it afloat. That's how it works.
We have to fight each day like there are unseen forces working to sink us. You have to protect your relationship like it's made of porcelain. You have to nurture it like it's a garden. One tip I'm glad I heard before we started this thing was not to ever talk bad about your partner to anyone. I used to know a lot of married women in their 30s when I was in my 20s and their favorite thing was to sit around and vent about their husbands. You can't do that.
When you complain about your other, the person you complain to, who is likely a good friend, will not understand when you forgive your partner the way that you do because they do not love them the way that you do. They will remember every bad thing you tell them about your sweetheart. Eventually, they'll interrupt your venting with, why are you still with this person? This isn't a thought you need to let invade your mind. But when you place the issues of your relationship outward, you open the door to the influx of invasive thoughts and opinions that don't belong. Keep your relationship issues within your relationship. When you talk about your partner, only build them up.
I started practicing this when we started dating and even more so when we started dating seriously, and it's been a blessing. Issues that I would normally run to my girlfriends with, I run to him with. We discuss them, solve them, and move on. It's good. It's not easy, but it's good. It's terrifying, but it's good. In the end, the day to day stresses that we deal with between the two of us are nobody's business but ours. And the act of addressing and solving those issues is how we build our relationship. It is how we repair our ship.
They tell you relationships are a lot of work, but they never tell you what exactly the work entails. I'm glad I started to figure it out before we started this thing. Build up your partner to themselves and to other people. Advocate for yourself and for your relationship. Have patience and compassion.
Knowing that we are both doing these things, I can say with confidence that should we sink, should this ship go down, I know that we went down fighting. And really that's the best I could hope for. That is our happy ending.