A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey...

I saw that movie yesterday and while I didn’t LOVE it, it made me think...

What if all our mistakes in love are only there to teach us not to give up?  That all the missteps and confusion, loss and maladaptive relationship strategies are really just there to help us evolve as loving, caring, kind human beings?  What if love’s continued presence in our lives is there to teach us that we are more than the people a few bad experiences warps?  What if the whole point of loving is never giving up?

The movie poses the question:  “Is love worth the risk?”  And the movie resoundingly answers, “YES!”  But it raises some interesting questions about who we tell ourselves we are, and who we actually are.

I related to Sarah.  A woman running scared.  Used to getting what she wants, which is something she isn’t really sure about.  She secures loving relationships with men who do not know her because she doesn’t want them to, and then she ultimately leaves them for the same reason.  And she blows up her relationships by cheating and leaving and generally behaving like an ass.

David is running scared as well but he fucks it up in another direction:  he can’t find a woman that is good enough.  He is always searching for someone who is going to make him happy, but only seems to find ones that bore him and let him down.  David’s unrealistic demands on love create a double bind where he stars himself as this man totally capable of love and loving, but then finds himself leaving the most important relationships in his life because he can’t ever get himself to believe that she is ever really going to be enough.  So in many ways, he does the same thing Sarah does:  doesn’t reveal himself and then blames the other person for his lack of revelation.

Sounds likes a lot of devastated relationships and marriages I see everyday...

One feels trapped and stymied by being loved too much and the other feels lost and losing by not being loved enough.  The result is the same, they orbit in their own circles in order to keep others at a safe distance so they can continue to repeat the pattern.

And I could relate to both of them.  More Sarah than David.  I have so often felt the unbearable weight of someone loving me too much, and so settled on someone who I know can’t and won’t ever love me too much.  Wasting myself chasing after men who will love me just enough to keep me hooked, but since I can see the ending in the beginning, present themselves (at least to me) as safer bets than the men who want too much or love too much.  In relation with someone who only cares for themselves, I can stay safe in my small, tight orbit of knowing that the guy I am dating will never demand or ask too much from me...he isn’t capable.  So therein lies a sense of safety for me, that is never very safe, and always ends in avoidable disasters, but it was part of the tight dysfunctional spiral I created with me and dating...

The movie asks the question, “Can we change?  Can we drop our own storyline long enough for something unexpected to happen?  Are we willing to forego the endless narrative that supports our dysfunction for something healthier and real?”

I will let you pay your $20 to find out for yourself the movie’s answer.  Supplanting instead my own processing on those questions...

Yes we can change, but it is not a one and done decision.  We have to make the decision to change and then a whole bunch of other decisions after that first one to support the decided change.  It isn’t easy and there is a lot of fear that accompanies all change.  It is an unremitting willingness to shoulder the responsibility that change demands.  And this is where most of us falter, we want the change, but we just don’t want it more than we want the way we dysfunctionally set it all up to work out.

We can drop our storyline, but it isn’t just dropped forever because we want It to be.  We have to hold steady and fast to our revelation that the way we are currently doing things is never going to bring us what our heart desires most.  And then we also have to have the courage to stand in our own convictions when the other party falters.

Change requires bravery and courage.  To stand in your own truth when everything in your body and mind is telling you to run.  That is hard stuff and too much of an ask for many of us.  We want the change but lack the fortitude to see it come to any kind of fruition because we are too scared, too fearful and too committed to repeating our own narrative that has never really gotten us anywhere we wanted to go. Instead our narrative is really more of an explanation for how we became the people we are...it begs the question, “do we want to be someone else?”

It is hard to own your defects and maladaptive ways. It is hard to be honest about yourself, without someone weaponizing that truth into a blade used to sever every tie that binds.  And, in the end, all ties bind, because that is the only real thing ties can do.  They bind you to another for better and worse.  And our expectations that it is ever going to be either/or is one of the beliefs that sets us up to fail from the beginning...

Love is a big, bold, beautiful journey...and it requires nothing less than everything from us.  We cannot have it all, unless we are willing to give and lose it all.  And most of us, myself included, haven’t ever really been able to do that.  We say we can, but when push comes to shove, we are out.  Our desire to be honest and willing to change, fails rather spectacularly.

Anyway, the movie got me thinking and asking myself questions about who I am and how I show up.  And what is resonating with me now is this idea that love, in all its missteps and misdeeds is really a big, bold, beautiful journey regardless of whether it all works out or not.  We are grown into better beings each time we take the risk of loving another...and we are never, ever promised the happy ending. Perhaps, the happy ending is simply that we are provide more information about what not to do, and that in and of itself contains all the seeds for change required...well, that and a great deal of emotional heavy lifting...

Again, still...