Letting Go and Letting Be

Let it be, let it be, let it be, oh, let it be

There will be an answer, let it be...

--Lennon and McCartney, of course, and gee, I wonder what the title could be

Very personal entry today.

When we first embarked on this journey, for all I professed to the contrary, I had certain assumptions about what new relationships would look like, especially over time. They would progress, see, getting closer and closer with certain milestones and markers of increasing commitment. The map I had in my head didn't have much detail, but it was there. As if I had any right at all to map a relationship that, at that point in time, didn't even exist yet.

I bumped up against this, hard, several times, once a new relationship did exist. I paid lip service to the idea of each partnership finding its own level...and then found myself feeling extremely insecure if the level I had in my head for "relationship x months old" didn't reflect reality. 

So ironic. So darkly amusing. I've been saying all along that "the people in the relationship matter more than the relationship"...and often acting in precisely the opposite way. 

It took awhile, but I have at long last learned to cherish what is rather than wishing for what might be.  Since then, of course, "what is" has deepened. 

There's a principle at work here that's referenced several times in Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God. The Universe, says 'God', is like a giant copying machine. What you express, you get back. If you think that you're happy, you feel happy. If you say that you're happy, you reinforce that happiness. And if you do things from a position of happiness -- such as, for instance, helping others -- you are made happier still. 

The same holds true with wanting. "I want happiness!" you shout to the Universe. And it goes "okey-doke", and gives you that exact experience...of wanting happiness!

The thing is, I KNEW ALL OF THIS and acted for a while as if I didn't. I don't know why. 

That's a lie. I do know why.

_______________________

Love is a synthesis, a coming together. As such, it's not surprising that love, like synthesized sound, has four phases: attack, decay, sustain, and release.

• Attack is that falling in love/New Relationship Energy stage, where you can't stay away from each other -- sometimes you literally attack each other in your zeal to be close.
• Decay is the inevitable end of the attack stage, when that first rush of hot love dissipates.
• Sustain is the playing out of the relationship over a period of time. 
• Release is just what it sounds like, whether it arrives with death or another kind of dissolution.

The decay' stage has always frightened me. It feels like going backwards. I hate to go backwards. I've always found it hard to summon the confidence to go forwards, and have been content to stand still for vast chunks of my life, which is shameful enough. Going backwards, or even the illusion that I am? Unthinkable.

And so what do I do? What I've always done. Overcorrect. Push. Sometimes a bit too hard.

There's something else.

Her previous partner and I could not be more dissimilar. He's male, I'm male, and I think that's about all we share. This was not by design on my part: we're just totally different individuals. But something he said to her at one point utterly horrified me. Paraphrasing, it was "there's no need for romance anymore".

It's not often I gasp aloud reading a text message. I did reading that one. And I thought they're done. Might take a while for them to know it, but they're done. 

(If you think I rejoiced at that...I didn't. I can't deny there was a bit of relief, because I knew from various other things she told me that they weren't at all right for each other. But most of what I thought was: there's going to come a point in the not too distant future where her heart is going to be hurting. Bad. If you imagine I'd find anything about that thought happy-making, you really don't know me at all.)

There came a point where they were done, and I was there to help her through the heartache, just as I had been offering emotional support since pretty much the day I started talking to her.

I could have just trusted in myself. I was already so much NOT-HIM that it should have been easy. I could have just trusted in her because she had placed immense trust in me: until I came along she never would have even considered abundant love.

But I didn't trust, not enough, not right away, and so I'd sometimes come out with too much of a good thing. This was explained to me, and I got it. It boiled down to, "practice what you preach".

The people in the relationship are more important than the relationship.

Let it go and let it be.