Love cycles

I’ve been meaning to write but I’ve been busy falling in love…pining away after a love feared lost…rejoicing in regaining it…and this pattern has been repeating itself.

Even my love cycles.

The other night as I was emailing a friend the latest update on this new crush of mine 1 Corinthians 13 rest heavily upon my spirit.

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Too often throughout the short course of this already dramatic love affair I’ve been entertaining, I have erred terribly from this picture of love. And my actions have been justified because I’ve been told by friends and told myself, “You deserve more.” So then with this mantra as my ammunition I become expectant and demanding. Impatient and rude. Proud of my ability to directly express my disappointment and desire for more to a man who often isn’t giving me what I want when I want it. I make myself heard without concern for his emotion. I am bitchy and bratty, bearing only what I deem worthy of my time or energy.

More have been quick to tell me, “He’s just not the right one…When the right one comes you’ll know it…Love should be easy,” they say.

Meanwhile nothing in this love passage suggests to me that love will be easy. On the contrary, everything in it suggests that along the way of loving I will be tested, my patience tried, faith in myself, my lover, and even love itself, put under fire.

And before we met, I’d been wondering why it is that I cannot find love?

Certainly men have wanted to love me, tried to love me, and failed to love me. I have honestly never even had a healthy monogamous relationship with a man I could call a long-term boyfriend. No flowers on Valentine’s Day, no Happy Birthday baby, no New Year’s Eve kisses.

I have spent recent years rightly learning how to truly love myself. Nurturing a reasonable dose of self-love is healthy…but an overdose I am beginning to fear can be deadly. Especially for one like me. I am good at solitude. I go to movies alone, out to lunch alone, won’t hesitate to travel alone. But once years ago, God whispered to me in a dark moment, “there are some things you can only learn in solitude, and some you can only learn in the company of others.” And I am hearing that same whisper again. In fact, it’s getting louder.

Twelve-steppers (with whom I did some hard time a couple years back) say, “Crazy is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”

Well, I’m done with crazy! What I want is love! To share my life with a man. To care for someone else in this world besides myself. To be unselfishly in love with a man who challenges me to be more than what I am today, while loving me exactly where I am today.

I pray for the man who God uses to teach me this next love lesson. It may not be easy for either of us. It has certainly not been easy for this one I am learning now to love.
With him I have found the wisdom of older women in my life who have themselves borne the weight of love most valuable. These women have seen him first and have encouraged me in times of prideful hard ass resentment to call him again, again…and again. Really?! ?! That's not desperate or insecure? No, has been their response, that is love.

And still I might have already lost this man ya’ll! No, of course he wasn’t perfect but he was pretty damn near close if you ask me. One of the variety that don’t come around but once is the sweet by and by. The first of his kind I could envision a future and a family with while still maintaining a vision of my own extraordinary dreams and goals.

The sense of loss I have felt in the miserable heartbrokenness of the past few weeks has quieted me enough to really see; to ask for this man’s forgiveness even despite his own transgressions and to forgive myself. I have heard God speak in my humility – You must be patient with all things…willing to see the other in love – their struggles, their desires, their confusion, their hope.

And this is why love is such a challenge…because everything in 1 Corinthians 13 suggests that love is not about ME.

This was a long one and I still feel like its an incomplete thought, but I must leave you now with a quote from a book I’ve been referencing called Love Signs. What I share was written in particular for me, a Gemini woman, but I feel it speaks more broadly. This is how it says she will gain the affection of the man she desires:

“If she will speak softly, move gently…slowly…she may enter his dream world with him, and see love the way he does – as a thing of calm and beauty. All it takes is putting herself in his place now and then, which will eventually lead her straight into his heart – the very haven she’s so long been searching for and thought she’d never find…that magical garden where roses grow without the need for protective thorns.”