I’ve been thinking about love again… (Eeek! Run away, run away!) I’ve heard several friends of mine weigh in on what I said about love recently, and I realize that perhaps I can’t just leave it at that. I see that I sound a little like a “typical career woman” who’s discounting the whole notion of love and having a lifelong loving relationship, marriage, and family, as somehow being less desirable than they really are. And to set the record straight, I really do believe in love. Real love, that is, not just the state of infatuation that we culturally equate with love.
The thing is, I spent a good decade or two (I started early) obsessed with the idea that I just wanted “to be married”. And within the last couple years, I realized that “to be married” was an unworthy goal. Because while that might be the desired end state, it would be meaningless unless it meant I married the right man. Frankly, I haven’t had the greatest luck with meeting and/or attracting the right sort of man. Partially it’s that I’m an unusual personality, partially that I’m looking for someone who’s far enough from the mainstream that my pool of likely candidates is pretty small. I don’t think it’s impossible to find him, and I haven’t given up on finding lifelong love in a committed relationship that will, eventually, lead to marriage and children.
However, dwelling on love or the lack thereof in my life has not proven a good way for me to live my life. When all I thought about was “finding The One,” I spent my time depressed and discontent. An obvious conclusion was that I wasn’t “good enough” to find someone, in one way or another, which I see now as a faulty conclusion.
I guess I’m saying that I’ve found that life without a relationship, without the immediate prospect of one, has many good aspects as well. And I’m trying to learn to appreciate the blessings that this kind of life will bring to me so that I’m not living in a perpetual state of wishing for what I don’t have. It seems to me to be poor training for future contentment to spend one’s single years in perpetual discontent. If I’m always unhappy because I don’t have “The One” in my life, how am I going to feel when I marry a man and he doesn’t behave up to my romanticized and idealistic standards? No, it seems to me that cultivating contentment in life as I have it now is a much better way to live and to prepare for life in the future.
If I can be happy with my life as it is now, I’m more likely to develop the habit of happiness, or at least of contentment, and I’m more likely to be able to love and accept someone in the future on his own terms. Instead of projecting all my dreams and longings on him, I’ll be able to see that most of the wish-fulfillment needs to come from myself, and that my partner is icing on the cake–a privilege rather than a right. Don’t we objectify our romantic partners when we expect them to do and be everything that we’ve ever hoped or dreamed? That doesn’t give them the room to be the absolutely human people that they are… flawed and inconsistently loving, at times, and as much in need of love and understanding as we are.
Since love isn’t in the cards for me, at least in the immediate future, I think it behooves me to make the most of what is in my life. Time enough for love and marriage and children when those are possibilities with hope of some embodiment. Dwelling on love and finding “The One” is a strategy calculated to ensure that I’m unhappy with what is good about life right now, and that I will be unable to appreciate the less-than-idyllic real-life relationships that enter my life at some point in the future.
So I haven’t given up on love–I’m just deferring thoughts about it until it’s a more meaningful and useful thing for me to spend my time on.
Posted by Kjirstin 
