“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
— ~ Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
“How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust–and also to make you feel so whole?”
— ~ Lauren Oliver
I spent 5 years hurting a good woman by staying with her but never fully choosing her.
I did want to be with this one. I really wanted to choose her. She was an exquisite woman, brilliant and funny and sexy and sensual. She could make my whole body laugh with her quick, dark wit and short-circuit my brain with her exotic beauty. Waking up every morning with her snuggled in my arms was my happy place. I loved her wildly.
Unfortunately, as happens with many young couples, our ignorance of how to do love well quickly created stressful challenges in our relationship. Before long, once my early morning blissful reverie gave way to the strained, immature ways of our everyday life together, I would often wonder if there was another woman out there who was easier to love, and who could love me better.
As the months passed and that thought reverberated more and more through my head, I chose her less and less. Everyday, for five years, I chose her a little less.
I stayed with her. I just stopped choosing her. We both suffered.
Choosing her would have meant focusing everyday on the gifts she was bringing into my life that I could be grateful for: her laughter, beauty, sensuality, playfulness, companionship, and so … much … more.
Sadly, I often found it nearly impossible to embrace – or even see – what was so wildly wonderful about her.
I was too focused on the anger, insecurities, demands, and other aspects of her strong personality that grated on me. The more I focused on her worst, the more I saw of it, and the more I mirrored it back to her by offering my own worst behavior. Naturally, this only magnified the strain on our relationship … which still made me choose her even less.
Thus did our nasty death spiral play itself out over five years.
She fought hard to make me choose her. That’s a fool’s task. You can’t make someone choose you, even when they might love you.
To be fair, she didn’t fully choose me, either. The rage-fueled invective she often hurled at me was evidence enough of that.
I realize now, however, that she was often angry because she didn’t feel safe with me. She felt me not choosing her everyday, in my words and my actions, and she was afraid I would abandon her.
Actually, I did abandon her.
By not fully choosing her everyday for five years, by focusing on what bothered me rather than what I adored about her, I deserted her. Like a precious fragrant flower I brought proudly into my home but then failed to water, I left her alone in countless ways to wither in the dry hot heat of our intimate relationship.
I’ll never not choose another woman I love again.
It’s torture for everyone.
If you’re in relationship, I invite you to ask yourself this question:
“Why am I choosing my partner today?”
If you can’t find a satisfying answer, dig deeper and find one. It could be as simple as noticing that in your deepest heart’s truth, “I just do.”
If you can’t find it today, ask yourself again tomorrow. We all have disconnected days.
“I am still learning how to ask for what I deserve without it also sounding like an apology.”
“Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are … bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart…”
— Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See.
“I love you and you break my heart but I’m young so I sweep up the glass and open the windows to let the light in and invite you back to do it again.”
— Fortesa Latifi
“Don’t love deeply, till you make sure that the other part loves you with the same depth, because the depth of your love today, is the depth of your wound tomorrow.”
—
Nizar Qabbani
“The universe is seeming really huge right now… I need something to hold on to.”
— ~ E. Lockhart; We Were Liars
“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”
— ~Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
— ~ Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“I still catch myself feeling blue about things that don’t matter anymore.”
— ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Unready to Wear
“Every introvert alive knows the exquisite pleasure of stepping from the clamor of a party into the bathroom and closing the door.”
— ~ Sophia Dembling - The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World
(via conflictingheart)
Najwa Zebian (via thequotejournals)
I can be mean, sweet, in between them all.
