Love, What Is It?

  There are many kinds of love. Love can make you happy or love can rob you blind. It’s up to you to decide which. The choice is yours, no one else’s.

  Like most girls, I grew up thinking that you met someone, you fell in love, got married and lived happily ever after.  Somewhere in there you had 2.5 kids.  I knew from the start that love, marriage and kids were not for me. I wanted more out of life. I wanted to write. I wanted to paint. I wanted to travel. No way was I getting involved with a mere guy and especially not one that smelled of barns and cow pies.

  I was attracted to guys, but they weren’t attracted to me. I think I scared them away. I was very shy. So I wrote, and I painted and I traveled. I photographed the world around me. I was the eyes and ears of the world.

  I was a virgin until I was in my early thirties. In my world there was no such thing as sex without marriage. Marriage was not in my plans.

  So I went on writing about the experiences of others. Two of my sisters married. They had kids. They had homes. They had husbands. They didn’t seem to be all that happy.

  So where was the “happily ever after?” From what I could see, it didn’t exist. Couples fought. Divorce was everywhere except in my family. In my family, marriage was forever, even if it was horrible, you stuck it out.

  One husband made his wife dress in short skirts and took her out to bars. When other men made passes at her, he broke her jaw.  The other husband said we were “damn Yankees” and took his bride to parts unknown.

  My cousins fared no better. Some were a lot worse. Neighbors were the same. The secretary of the church was married, but she and her kids lived in New York. Her husband lived in Florida with other women.

I used to think my parents had a good relationship. Boy, was I wrong! They fought and abused each other verbally, usually where us kids couldn’t see. I didn’t find out about this until after I moved away. Maybe it was going on right under my nose, but I was a kid. I had no time to notice.

  There were apple trees to climb, books to read and pictures that had to be taken. I would climb my tree, armed with a book, my camera slung around my neck and pencil and pad of paper. Sometimes I’d haul up a packet of tomatoes or apples or a peanut butter sandwich.

  In my tree, I dreamed of a world of happiness. I would look out over a sea of green oats waving in the breeze and imagine I was shipwrecked on an island. On my island, I was content. I had everything I needed. I’d sketch and write and dream and not see half of the real life going on around me.

  When I met the man who became my husband, I had no idea what the real world was like. I’d never dated much. My dad believed that we should stay at home. Visitors were not encouraged.

  Most of my ideas about men and women I gleaned from True Story or Modern Romances. Women did what they had to do to make ends meet and keep their mates happy.

  My parents got married near the beginning of World War II. My mom said it was important that you gave your husband whatever he wanted. If he wanted to go somewhere, you dropped everything to go with him. Life could be very short.

  She told us when we were growing up that when a man cheated on his wife, it was because he didn’t get what he wanted at home. I grew up thinking that whatever a man wanted was law. You kept him happy or else he wandered off to where he could find what made him happy.

  In time, through a lot of book reading, I formed other ideas. When I got married, I knew I wasn’t in love. I married because I thought it was my last chance. It didn’t seem to matter that I was not in a thrilling love affair. I had reached a point in my life where I wanted to try marriage. I wanted to see what I was missing.

  When things went wrong, I thought it was my fault. I didn’t love him enough. I couldn’t do enough to make him happy. He was quick to blame me and I was quick to accept that blame. I thought if I tried harder, worked harder, things would work out. There must be something wrong with me. It was a long time before I realized that there is no such thing as a “story book ending.” It was also a long time before I realized that it was not me that had the problem.

  I had a son, for whom I am eternally grateful. I spent years not loving anyone other than my son and relatives because I didn’t love myself. I had fallen into that trap that a lot of us stumble into in our lives. Melodie Beattie in Stop Being Mean To Yourself, calls it “the box.”

  A lot of us live our lives in this box.  We believe what we are taught. We believe that if someone doesn’t love us, it’s because there is something wrong with us. We think our “place” is in that box. We have to follow the rules.  We get put in this box by our parents, our partners, or our beliefs. It’s up to us to find a way out of the box. Each of us must find our own pathway. It’s the only way we can free ourselves to love and accept love.

  We have to choose to love ourselves instead of waiting for someone to choose us.  None of us, male or female needs another person to validate our existence. We are here for a purpose. That purpose is to be happy, to love ourselves.

  We have to learn to accept that we are the way we are and who we are because that’s how it’s supposed to be. We got to this point in life because our destiny led us here. All of our past experiences made us who we are today.

  We have to learn to accept that if someone doesn’t love us it’s not because we are unlovable, but because it is not their destiny to love us. There is nothing wrong with loving someone who doesn’t love you.

  I used to be stuck in this box. I thought you could only love one person at a time or ever. I thought if the person you loved didn’t love you, it meant there was something wrong with you. Both of these beliefs are wrong.

  The human heart is not just a thing of valves and muscles and blood. We call it the heart, but of course, we mean that part of the brain that allows us to feel emotion. There is room in there to love as many as we want. It’s capacity is unlimited.

  I go to the garden. I pick up a sweet smelling deep red rose. I hold it to my nose and inhale the fragrance. At the edge of the garden, I spot the daisy. The daisy is just as lovely as the rose, but in a different way. I don’t think, “I love this rose, therefore I cannot love that daisy.”  I put the flowers together and enjoy the presence of both.

  There are flowers I don’t like. I am not fond of red geraniums. This does not mean that these flowers are not lovely in their own right or that they are unlovable. It just means that it is not my destiny to love geraniums.

  A lot of people wonder what the purpose of life is. A Mormon friend told me the purpose to life was happiness and the pathway to happiness was in service to others. Does this mean being a doormat for your partner?  I don’t think so. I think it means accepting others and always being willing to lend a helping hand where it’s needed.

  To be continued