We're told not to settle, but that advice may leave us dying childless and alone.
We're told "settling" means being with someone who's less than you deserve.
But, really, "settling" means marrying someone who doesn't make you all hot and bothered.
The quality of the person is peripheral; of prime importance is the way they make you feel.
What's important is how your brain chemicals react in the other's presence.
And that's how we make some of our most important decisions.
Really, we're acting like animals but pretending we're civilized.
We're so easily misled. There are moments when we're with someone and the world feels right, we feel like we're coming alive, finding ourselves again. There's a quick in our step and an exhilaration in our blood and we risk daring to hope that sometimes, just maybe, dreams come true. I held her hand in mine as we walked the quiet small town streets and I felt all these things, and I haven't felt them since. I keep asking myself Why I felt the way I did, and Why I just can't seem to find that again. Perhaps these feelings were circumstantial: it wasn't so much her as what she symbolized, a resurrection of my true self and the touch of God's favor in my life. I want to believe that, of course, because the alternative is that I felt the way I did because it was nothing short of love. If it's the former rather than the latter, then I can write it off to sleep deprivation and unpolluted country air. If it's the latter, well, that means something, and I have to try and make sense of it without going crazy at the same time. If there's meaning to it, and it was for nothing, then the meaning's lost, betrayed by history.
Such connections are rare, like ships passing in the night. Am I to interpret what I felt as love? When Bo and I were talking back in late March, I was on the fence about dating her since she lived so far away (at least an hour). But with the other, I was ready to move 15 hours in a heartbeat to be with her. I've never felt that way about anyone: willing to leave friends and family to embark on an adventure with someone quite unlike anyone you've ever met before. It's almost been two years since we "talked," since I held her hand, but I still think of her quite often. I haven't felt that way about anyone since Courtney, and even then, there was something different about her. The perfect match, everything I've ever wanted, yearned for, prayed for in a woman. But it wasn't just that: with her, us, there was a wholeness. She made my world come alive, made me see things differently, beautifully. And since she's gone, a certain darkness has settled, broken only by brief flickers of bleak light. I don't know if I love her, or loved her, but I know it's the closest thing to it that I've known. If love isn't the giving and sharing of yourself, of sacrificing and serving for another, then what is it? Because that's precisely what I wanted with her. I haven't felt that, or wanted that, with anyone since her, and it's stained my relationships.
I measure everything against that, everyone against her. When I go out on dates, I'm thinking, "Oh, she's like her in this way," or, "Oh, she's different in this way..." It's as if I'm trying to capture what I can't have. Measuring everything against the way I felt back then is ridiculous, because it's naive: I can't base what I think we would've been like off a three-day weekend when all felt right and real. If we ended up together we would've had shitty days, we would've fought, we would've gotten under each other's skin and irritated the hell out of one another. There would be times when we'd just want to not be around one another. Measuring everything against what I felt isn't just naive, it's also self-sabotage: I inadvertently blind myself to other women who would be great with me. On top of all this, if what I felt was more circumstantial than any "feeling from God," then I'm putting weight and meaning upon something that really has no weight and meaning, and I'm basically saying, "If my brain chemicals aren't working in such a way as to make me feel the things I felt up north, then there's no future here." That's pretty damned stupid.
This "flash of love," this "feeling" that I'm striving for, it's just a feeling. Had we ended up together, that feeling wouldn't have lasted. Not at all. Life's still shitty, and I still have my down days. Perhaps it's unfortunate that the time I spent with her happened to circumstantially be some of the best times I've had in the past couple years: not just things with her, but getting out of the city for a while, going on a road trip, living life down in Cincinnati at the Claypole House with all those people who mean so much to me, I actually enjoyed working where I work and was (for some reason) proud of it. Life just happened to be going well, and she was part of that but not ALL of that. How many married couples, happy and in love, will tell you that they feel a sort of "coming alive" with their spouse, a freedom with their spouse (good luck with that one), that they're eyes are opened on a daily basis by the one they love, that those euphoric feelings better than drunkenness still underscore their interactions and conversations and life together? That's not what you find. Because those feelings fade.
Expecting a pie-in-the-sky, lovey-dovey, all the world's aright and my heart's afire kind of love is expecting too much. The feeling of love is biochemical, after all; and science has shown that people's feelings of love for one another are rather dependent upon outside forces. Our feelings are circumstantial. Those feelings of infatuation, of love, whatever you want to call it, they fade and there are no exceptions. The honeymoon phase, when those feelings are alive and well, that's a pleasant stage. But it doesn't last. And if a relationship or marriage is based on feelings, it won't last, either. Waiting on that "flash of love," waiting to be smitten or swept off your feet, leaves you waiting for something fleeting, waiting for something that won't last, and you may be left waiting forever.
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