What About Love - A Written Therapy Exercise

I woke up this morning thinking about love.

Looking back on my 52 years of modern primate life, I have grown and changed a lot. I once read a piece about a couple who had been together nearly 60 years. The woman was asked what it what like to be married to the same man for so long. Her reply was matter of fact - “I haven’t been married to the same man for 60 years. I have been married to 5 different men.”

She was referring to the fact that we grow and change constantly. We’re shaped by our experiences. Small nudges along the way that cause us to choose differently as forks in the road emerge along our timelines. The relationships that last are the ones in which this evolution is valued and supported with compassion and communication.

The one constant in my life that I don’t think has changed very much, is the way that I show up with love. I love fully and completely. I’m an all in kind of guy. When I choose you, you will feel loved. When I choose you, I will more or less take my heart, and hand it over to you. I fall hard.

Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends, but the one that had the most impact on my was Mariecke. I always wanted to have a steady girlfriend and I remember loving her so deeply. When I was 18, I came down with mononucleosis and was out for the count for 3 months. It was during that time that she broke up with me. I was destroyed. Perhaps it was my illness that drove her away - I never found out. I’d ask, “why would she leave me at a time like this?” At a time when I needed her the most, she left and just like that, I never saw her again, except in the halls at school holding hands with her new boyfriend.

The day she broke it off I cried hard. I recall going for a drive in the pouring rain, crying and thinking about ways that I could get her to come back to me. Reenactments of the 1989 Movie “Say Anything” where Lloyd (John Cusack) stands outside Diane’s (Ione Skye) house with a portable stereo blasting Your Eyes, by Phil Collins swirled through my head. In my case, it was You’ve lost that Loving Feeling by The Firm, which I blasted on my car’s cassette player, singing at the top of my lungs as I sped around the outskirts of Deep River, Ontario in my 82 Toyota Tercel. Perhaps it’s the combination of 80’s rom-coms and badly wanting a romantic relationship that made me this hopeless romantic. I never did stand outside her window.

Maybe I had never learned healthy boundaries. Maybe I didn’t learn the value of holding back and protecting my heart. More than that, maybe I didn’t learn to love myself. I have had several relationships, been married twice, and the one thing that I have realized is that loving completely with all of my heart has the negative side of having my foundation rocked when that love is rejected. The bigger the heart, the bigger the emotions. I fall hard and fast into love, and in my experience, the ones that I choose and who choose me fall right along with me.

I have grown a lot in the last 5 years but the way I show up with love seems to be an aspect of my personality that I can’t change. A trench in my consciousness that has been scoured deep by over 5 decades of existence. You’d think I would have learned by now.

I’m not sure how to conclude here other than to say - Don’t be afraid of showing love. No matter if it’s one of your close buddies, or your partner. I regularly tell friends that are close to me that I love them and I mean it.

Thanks for reading.

Loving you