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Love Addict: Do You Just Know?
When it’s true love, do you know right away, or do you figure it out over time?
It’s easy enough to look at the why-I-shouldn’t-haves. The these-things-can-be-worked-outs. Even the was-it-just-out-of-hastes?
Details are really not necessary. It really comes down to a conversation I had with an old friend a couple of weeks ago. She said to me, “So, maybe it isn’t true that you just know?”
“I think it’s true for some people,” I replied. “But not for people like us.”
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Even as I said it, my gut twisted into knots. Really? Didn’t I believe that when I found that right person, I would just know? History tells me one thing – that I go back and forth on everything, all of the time. I know that about myself.
But my spiritual work, my emotional work, my belief system that I’ve tapped into after so many years of struggle, tells me otherwise. It whispers, “Yes, you will know. It’ll be that clear, because that’s what you asked for, prayed over, have given up to the cosmos.”
Last weekend, I sat with another friend, sipping some 3-week-old champagne and watching her talk through a haze of cigarette smoke. I had just driven to her house through what felt like a sandstorm in the desert – light brown dirt swirling through the air and scratching the windshield of my car as I drove over a bridge on the French Broad.
We hardly live in a desert, though – in fact it is a lush green landscape in the mountains, and so I felt transported. Now, we huddled just underneath the jutted roof, which barely protected us from the drizzle, my side slowly getting wet as she told me a story from her recent travels.
“This woman I worked with, we sat and talked a lot. We talked a lot about love. And she gave me this advice that I’ve been carrying around in my heart ever since. She said, ‘fall in love with someone for their faults, not for their lovely parts. Because it is their faults that you will have to deal with for the rest of your life.”’
It struck me, even before she finished the last sentence. Of course you have to love and hold and cherish that which may irritate, hurt, and even shame you in the other. Because it is a mirror of your own insecurities, your unfulfilled desires, your need to be accepted and loved for your pain.
You can’t hide from yourself when the other is there, in plain sight.
I returned home a couple of hours later only to find my street covered in tree branches, and blocked off by workers and trucks. Electric lines were down on the corner and around the turn, and when I drove around the other way to get to my house, I saw massive trees virtually ripped in half next to my driveway. The sandstorm I had experienced just a town over had been what I later heard was a microburst here, on my street. In my driveway.
I didn’t have time to sit and think – I had to be somewhere soon, and my electricity, of course, was off. But the next couple of days, I drove by those half-alive trees and I thought about how quickly change comes, without warning. Sometimes, it can rip you in half. But it always lays the ground for new life, a life built by the intertwined energy of beings from ether to dust, bacteria to hard matter.
From that half springs a new whole – taking part of what was, and evolving into something even better.
I know I take that broken half with its flaws and imperfections and knowledge and trust, and grow into the world in a different form. I grow my ability to love my own flaws from the brokenness and in that, grow my ability to love another for their flaws from the tornado that has at some point, wrecked them too.
And that yes, when love shows up, I will just know.