Today is valentine’s day and all day I’ve been pondering over all the lessons that love has taught me through the years. In my childhood I thought that love was like the fairy tales. You would meet the perfect guy and together you would unconditionally love each other and ride into the sunset living a happy ever after. I had my parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles as examples of how love was a lifelong commitment to your partner and to me that was just the natural way of things when it came to love.
But love has proven to be an elusive thing in my life. It is riddled with projections, unhealed wounds, little white lies, manipulation and false hopes and expectations. My relationships have confronted me with the true nature of both myself and my partners and have provided crash courses in reality checks and the limits that love should have.
In each partner I found the conditioning of their parents and on some level these clashed with mine, I was confronted with the wounds they had attained in previous relationships and I confronted them with mine, I felt restricted by their routines and expectations of me as a partner and they felt the same in dealing with mine.
The most wonderful thing that my relationships have taught me is how to properly love myself, my partners forced me to set boundaries, enabled me to see myself for who I really am, made me experience how important it is to honour my values and moral codes and most importantly to recognise when love has left the building.
My love life has not been a walk through the park but I’m infinitely grateful for the lessons it brought me. In truth I’ve never been lonelier than in when I was in the wrong relationship and some of my most peaceful moments have been when I was on my own enjoying a glass of wine and a cigar while staring into a fire.
A part of me still feels that it would be nice to enjoy that moment with a significant other, but it is no longer a condition for me to be happy. I have been blessed with a lot of love in my life, a large family, really good friends, amazing teachers, profound books of wisdom and a wealth of happy memories travelling the world.
The lyrics from a song by Whitney Houston keeps popping into my head as I’m writing this blog and I feel they are the perfect closure for today: “Learning to love yourself, is the greatest love of all.”
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