I have never been in such emotional despair as I was in the months before I left my first marriage.
Yet the very night I met him, I told my college roommate that I just knew he was the man I was “supposed to” marry. I just knew deep in my heart that we would be married. And I was right.
About nine years later we were divorced, and I was pretty much where you are now, sobbing and doubting, and wondering if I could ever trust again, another man, or any feeling of love.
I ended up single for over ten years. Dating, but never having that feeling.
Then suddenly I met another man, and again I just knew. Just like the first time, I came home from our date and told my friend that I just knew we would be married. And again, I was right. And we’ve been married for 15 years.
Now in my fifties, as I reflect upon this struggle you are having with love, I realize what I learned in that first marriage, and what I am learning now.
In my twenties, I lost myself in my relationship — thinking it was love to sacrifice what I wanted for what he wanted, to compromise away just about everything I held most dear.
I have only myself to blame for that.
Love demands of us that we continue to love ourselves equally in our relationships, because if we don’t, we lose all sense of self and wither until we die inside.
How can we love anyone else, when we feel dead inside?
We can’t. I learned that lesson the hard way. I hope you don’t have to.
But what a loving lesson that was for me to learn.
My first soulmate in this lifetime gave me the opportunity to love him, a very intense soul, without losing myself. And though I failed to do so the first time, because of that experience, I eventually did learn to “hold my light steady.” Gradually, I came to remember my deepest nature as a soul, and to learn how to never let that part of me extinguish.
When I met my current husband, I was forty-one, and candidly, I was so busy trying to establish the career of my soul’s true purpose (finally!), that I wasn’t even looking to date, much less find a husband. Yet, the Universe provided. It was as if the Universe smiled lovingly down upon me, and seeing my progress in learning how to really live who I was as a soul, sent another soulmate my way.
I had only just moved to Colorado a few weeks prior, post masters in counseling psychology, and suddenly there he was. By the following year, we were married.
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