I lost count of my partners when my numbers passed my age in my early 20’s.  After 3 cancelled engagements by age 22 and sincere, heartfelt efforts at trying to be a good mate, it was clear I didn’t have the chips to play the poker game of love, with myself or with another person.  Something was very much missing from my toolset.  After 25 years and a notably questionable strategy of hundreds of short and long attempts at love, it isn’t missing anymore.  I found it for keeps.  And it is powerful.  This is a quick chronicle of how I got it.

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After such early failures and realizations, I set off full speed into life, to search for the accumulation of experiences and skills that would allow me to know love.  I don’t know the body count at this point, but estimates based on run rates and timing would place the damage in the range of 400-500 over 25 years.  That includes all those engagements, a 7 year marriage (free of shenanigans of even the sanctioned variety, for the most part), and never having been disloyal to any boyfriend in between.  So take a minute and enjoy the novelty of that.  But then read on, because, well, it worked.

What is love?

The funny thing about searching for what you don’t understand is that you have no idea what you are searching for.  If you knew what it looked like, you wouldn’t need to go looking for it.  So how do you look for what you can’t even recognize?

Searching for understanding is like driving through fog.  You can only see what is right in front of you, so you plow through the 10 feet you can see and then move on to the next 10 feet.  You can drive thousands of miles like that.  You can even do it really fast if you can handle the risk and terror.  Or you can slow down, put your blinkers on, and move carefully.  Some people just pull off, get a hotel, and stay safe and locked up, never to leave again.  But the beauty is that you can combine all of those approaches.  Roar down the road a bit, take a rest, poke carefully, then hit the gas again.  This keeps you safe and sane.  Because barreling into the unknown takes rest, consideration, assimilation, resilience, and massive huevos.

What is sex?

Sex is incredible intimacy.  And it doesn’t matter whether you share that intimacy for years or for an hour.  It’s the same.  It’s the challenge of deciding to see the person (or people, or gimps, or whatever) in front of you, show yourself, and navigate together the creation of something that may fall anywhere between the innocent and the bizarre – or something you never imagined before.  This thing you create is a trust fall.  It’s a painting that peers into your soul and theirs, then immediately gets erased, never to be known in that way again.

Meeting new people (whether it involved sex or not) always made me feel like the spiritual UPS driver.  I have this truck of packages (skip the pun on that), and at least one of them is for this person who is in front of me at this minute.  We dance around a bit, we wait, and then suddenly, BOOM, I know what the delivery is.  It happens every time.  And every now and then, I could see the delivery to me happen too.  It is usually a bit of knowledge, guidance, acceptance, challenge, or understanding.  We watch it change hands and then we move on.  Maybe an hour, maybe years.

The recipe for love

Delivery by delivery, I started driving through the fog toward the love I didn’t know, trying to crack each mystery of my own heart one blind step at a time, with help at every turn.

The phases evolved roughly like this.

Let it be noted that at each phase of learning, whatever relationship existed in the previous phase was entirely broken by the learning that underpinned the next phase.  This reflects a cycle of growth but also unavoidable and repeated destruction, and there is no “good” or “bad” about it.  A love based in power can’t exist in kindness.  A love based in kindness without vulnerability can’t exist in sincerity.  In each case, my learning wasn’t my partner’s learning and that ended the relationship, again and again.  Now here you go:

Love v1:  V1 love for me was based on merit and honor.  This was childhood love.  It wasn’t warm or accepting, but it was strong and reliable.  No man left behind, ever.  But the price was adherence.  Be and do according to the rules.  Your adherence shows your love.

Love v2:  V2 love was about power and service. If V1 required childhood loyalty and adherence, then the addition of more adult passion became the escalation of that, which is power.  Love must serve without asking.  Love also must expect without asking and control covertly (because otherwise the servant would never get what she/he must have to survive).

Love v3:  V3 love added acceptance and value.  Power-based love on its best days walks right up to the edge of abuse and on its worst, crosses right over.  Anyone willing and able to stay on the subservient end of power-based love has sacrificed or never known what it feels like to love him- or herself.  For me, that included significant self-loathing and a corresponding heaping of judgment onto others.  The beginning of love started with V3, with strangers.  The first step was taking on the challenge of seeing the perfection in people I didn’t know.  Looking at them with soft eyes and finding the beauty, even when it wasn’t apparent.  When you pause and look sincerely, every person is beautiful.  And little by little, seeing that there was beauty in every person, I started to suspect there was beauty in me too and that maybe I could be more than adherent and controlling.

Love v4: Love V4 was about kindness.  I had to let go of the merit and adherence aspect of what I had known of love.  I had to stop trying to control the outcomes, even if I thought my vision was better for everyone (it’s not, btw).  I literally used a post-it note as a bookmark to remind me to always choose kindness.  The timing on this was important:  I had gotten married and was finally able to see myself in relationship.  I saw the harshness and the coldness and the effect it had on this sweet man I wanted to love.  I wanted him to have kindness, so I had to learn to choose it, every minute.

Love v5:  V5 was about vulnerability.  I learned that kindness without risk and sincerity is condescension.  In a moment when I thought I knew better than the person in front of me, if I wanted to be kind, I had to dig deep into myself and find and share my own feelings. Instead of bringing my project plan to solve whatever I thought the problem was (and I make GREAT project plans, really…), I had to set it aside, see this man in front of me, take a slow breath, and show him my raw love, fear, sadness, whatever.  I had to stop coldly solving problems and figuring things out and let him see me cry and ask for love and help.  I had to only solve my half of the problem and then invite and wait for him to bring his needs and love to the table.  That never happened, btw.

Love v6: Love V6 was about emptiness.  After adding and adding to the toolbox, V6 was about dumping it all on the ground and walking away.  The addition of kindness and vulnerability had tempered my harshness but hadn’t erased the underlying values of merit and control that still informed how I loved people.  V6 made me face the fact that I didn’t know shit and that all my effort was just turning up the volume on a crappy song.  It wasn’t going to work.  I didn’t know what would work because it was the only song I knew.  So V6 forced me to turn off all the music and sit in the emptiness of knowing what sucks but having no idea what to replace it with.  This was the hardest version.  Despite what the memes on Pinterest say, letting go of the crap ideas you are stuck to doesn’t transform your world instantly into unicorns and rainbows.  It isn’t magic.  It is nature and nature is harsh.  It means you sit on a pile of destruction like an exhausted phoenix, with no map, for a really long time, managing your own terror and relying on the people around you to ensure you don’t just disappear into god knows what.  V6 was the most important part of finding love.  It was awful.

Love v7: V7 was about purity.  Pulling out of the nothing, I wanted to find love that didn’t expect anything, didn’t own anything.  I had been so afraid of all my own needs in the past.  I truly didn’t believe that I could survive without one man to look after me – emotionally, financially, physically, logistically.  I didn’t think I could manage my life with just my own skills.  It was a visceral, survival-level fear.  So I decided there could be no love without getting that off the table.  So the next man I found was kind of my first love.  It was the first time love didn’t come from a place of need, of propping me up and filling my deficiencies and tending to my fears, counter-balanced by me controlling and trying to do everything while reassuring myself I was under the care of someone else who was protecting me.  It wasn’t the best relationship, but it was wonderful for me because I watched how it all unfolded and I saw that, for the first time, I just really loved somebody, without needing anything from them.  In good and bad times, I just wanted the best for him.  I also wanted the best for me.  I grieved sincerely and deeply when things were wrong (they often were).  I felt what it was like to just actually love someone as they are, just because they are.

Love v8:  And finally, version 8 was about showing up and being seen.  Through all of that searching and trying, I had still been doing one powerfully cowardly thing:  curating what I brought to the relationship.  I observed the men in front of me, decided like a personal shopper what would work for them, then reached into the bag of all I am and gave them just those parts.  In V8, I took the purity of V7 and with no sense of expectation or future, brought all of myself to the equation.  And with all the diverse, beautiful, and messy parts of who I am out to be seen, I was loved more than ever before by someone more magnificent than anyone I had ever even hoped to know.  And during that relatively short, but intense time, it was like watching the 43 year-old gaping hole in my heart get filled with this incredibly strong, flexible, beautiful patch, given to me to keep.  I got whole.

And the funny thing about this love is that it is mine to keep.  While it was more fun to have him around and while I have grieved and will feel that sadness of his absence for a long time, it’s a different kind of loss.  The love is still here.  Somebody loved me in a way that can’t be lost, ever.  And I cemented it by loving myself so well that I was able to receive it, return it in a way that I am proud of, and ultimately choose my own health and protection in allowing it to end gracefully at the right time.

What I am taking forward is a tremendous sense of grace, wholeness, and trust.  I feel how perfect this is.  I know that things exist in time and that even the most powerful things end.  I guess it is strange, but I believe in this love so much that I don’t need to possess it or to know anything about any tomorrows.  I already have all the tomorrows.

Love v9: Love V9 is starting here and I don’t know where it is going, but it is about the power of wholeness.  I have pretty much closed the shop on romantic love for now.  I don’t need it.  I am so full.  I don’t need to go looking for more.  V9 is about channeling the power of finally, finally being whole and taking it out into the world to become who I can be on the biggest stage I can find.  That energy that has been searching to know love all this time now has turned into creative energy, curiosity, courage, and hunger for life and learning.  I feel secure in the world.  I feel ready.  I am here.  Finally, like a middle-aged Velveteen Rabbit, I got loved into actually being here.

I am so grateful.  The journey to find love was really the journey to become love.  I am love now.  And I have a lot to do.

Thoughts?  Please leave ideas, comments, rants of your own below…

Love Is Mystical

Cold War Kids

And when my heart won’t break
An empty space between my lungs
And when my knees won’t shake
I’ll drink to find inspiration
‘Cause I’m a red blooded man
But I can’t see behind the sun (I can’t see behind the sun)
A supernatural plan
Is coming to meet me now

Living life with no need for the brakes
Something happens when I lean on my mistakes

Love is mystical
Love will break the chains
You might feel invincible
And you might be afraid
Light in darkness will show you the way
Give you the power to believe again

‘Cause I’m a rational man
And I can see how far I’ve come (I can see how far I’ve come)
But I don’t know where to stand
Or who’s coming to meet me now

Living life with no need for the brakes
Something happens when I lean on my mistakes
If the words are true
And the words reveal the same
I come alive when I don’t even think

Love is mystical
Love will break the chains
You might feel invincible
And you might be afraid
Light in darkness will show you the way
Give you the power to believe again

Oh, can’t you hear the future is calling
For heaven’s sake
It’s either hell or high water
Let’s get outta this place
I feel your skeptical eyes
On my mental state
I lift my hands to the sky
And I lower the stakes, oh yeah
And I lower the stakes, oh yeah
And I lower the stakes

Love is mystical
Do you feel the same?
Love is irresistible
It’s calling out your name
Light in darkness will show you the way
Give you the power to believe again
Give you the power to believe again
Give you the power to believe again
Give you the power to believe again
Give you the power to believe again

To believe again
To believe again

Songwriters: David Quon / Joe Plummer / Lars Stalfors / Matthew Maust / Matthew Schwartz / Nathan Willett

Love Is Mystical lyrics © Downtown Music Publishing, May The Bridges I Burn Light The Way