Relationships ebb and flow. They evolve and sometimes devolve.
Not everyone we meet is meant to be a forever person. This can be heartbreaking, we can find ourselves clinging to relationships that are long past their expiration date, everyone miserable, but no one being willing to have the agency and maturity to walk away.
Some people are meant to be a forever person but how that plays out we can't know and likely their roles change over time. Most of my “forever people” haven’t been in my life every step of the way, we have entered and exited each other’s lives to varying degrees over the decades, and still always find our ways back to each other.
I want to leave everyone I meet in a better place than when we first met. I want all my relationships to be about expansion and growth. Mine and theirs. I want us supporting each other’s change and development, even if that means we are supporting us moving away from each other instead of coming closer.
The other person has to want that too. Sadly not everyone does.
I've dated many people since my marriage ended six years ago. Four have had significant impact, helping me regain parts of myself I had lost or repressed, healing wounds they didn’t inflict and that I never thought would heal, supporting me as I regained my confidence and eventually began my unmasking process. Each relationship built upon the other and have lead me to where I am today, finding my ways to more intense and deeper intimacy, with not only my lovers, but also with my friends and chosen family.
Most of these people didn’t want their own expansion or growth, one did, but was too terrified of doing the work to make the changes necessary. Which at the end of the day is the real reason each of these relationships ended. As much as each one helped me push at the confines of my own comfort zone they couldn't budge (enough) from theirs.
Some expanded and grew... not with me, perhaps along side me. Our separate expansions ultimately are why we needed to end, or really not-so-simply change the kind of relationship we have.
People can have profound life changing impacts on us and not stay. This was something I had a very hard time accepting early in my post-marriage dating life. It is something that comes much more naturally now, though there is always profound grief as relationships come to their organic endings (be those permanent or temporary endings, only time will tell).
People can have profound life changing impacts on us and stay but not in the same ways. When we are able to be in the flow of relationship, allowing the natural expansions and contractions, shifting and morphing, it is heart opening and bittersweet and beautiful all at once.
All of the people I have dated, along with my best friends, have helped me to work through my own issues of abandonment, in very different ways. Each relationship was gorgeous and amazing and magical and painful in unique ways. I thank the gods for each of them.
And.
Over time, I have been able to see not only the growth and healing that came from each relationship, but all the ways each was either harmful or stifling. The ways some refused his own growth. The ways some were terrified of my growth. The ways some let fear of connection and intimacy keep us in a holding pattern.
I’ve been learning how to love more openly. Every person in my life gives me the opportunity to practice this. It's not easy. My armor is thick and heavy, however I am learning when to appropriately take it off.
This process is at times painful and filled with grief. It is also magical and amazing. And it has lead me to a place of immensely emotionally intimate relationships with friends, and is giving me opportunities to develop that same kind of intimacy with lovers, as they come and and go. I have found that as much as I feared this kind of intimacy, I deeply craved it, and now that I have it in some relationships, I want it with more.
Being in the unfolding and seeing what is possible within our relationships is part of this work. It asks us to slow down, to be honest with ourselves, and to be vulnerable with others. It invites us to express our wants and desires, without demanding them. It requires us to continue doing our own inner work, and giving support and space for others to do theirs. It asks us to be in the now, not allowing ourselves to get too caught up in “future tripping,” and instead to savor what is, right this moment.
This can be intense work, and honestly the more I do it, the more I feel it is worth all the challenges, struggles, and heartbreak it can bring.
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This essay was orginally published in May 2020. It has been editted and revised for publication today.
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