On love and leaving (or burn, baby, burn!)

May the bridges I burn light the way. by Mike Monteiro

It would be a ter­ri­ble movie. The girl. The guy. They meet, fall in love. Every­thing is delight­fully sim­ple. They com­mu­ni­cate well. They don’t lay blame. They don’t project their issues. They over­come mole­hills before they become moun­tains. They sim­ply hold each other as with­mates, com­pan­ions and lovers, and live hap­pily ever after.

Ter­ri­ble plot. Who wants to see that right? Except I do. But not in the movies — in the lives of my clients, friends, and what the hell, even myself!

It’s the numero ono topic I read cards about. “I’d like to know about my rela­tion­ship,” they start out. And okay, I really don’t mind. We all want to be in love and be loved back — it’s pretty uni­ver­sal. And I totally get it. But then so many of my won­der­ful clients are in sour rela­tion­ships and I gotta admit, I cringe — it breaks my heart and dead­ens my soul when I hear an oth­er­wise intel­li­gent, inde­pen­dent woman say to me,

“It’s just been so hard, there’s been so much drama, it just HAS to be right. I work SO HARD for this rela­tion­ship. He MUST be the one.”

These are women in pain, it’s pal­pa­ble and I feel it. I’ve been there. It’s been awful and har­row­ing and I couldn’t stop the hurt even when I was both in the midst of it and aware of it from the outside.

I hit a wall with this some­time last year. Had this real­iza­tion about my life, my self, my soul, which was sti­fled and cold. It went like this: I woke up and real­ized that it was my life. My self. My soul that was on the line. That’s about all the con­trol I can main­tain over this phys­i­cal world, and I was squan­der­ing it, try­ing to fit into this rela­tion­ship that was about two sizes too small.

So I guess you’re won­der­ing if I knew all along that my mar­riage wouldn’t last? Did I see it? Well, I can hon­estly tell you that I knew that my rela­tion­ship was no longer serv­ing me. That I was no longer grow­ing in love, but rather, my ex and I had grown apart. I guess the real ques­tion becomes, if I would have known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my mar­riage would end, would that have changed the way I felt in the rela­tion­ship? And the answer is prob­a­bly not. I still would have fallen in love. I still would have got­ten mar­ried. I would have said, Fuck you, Fate! This is awe­some right now!

And you know what? While it lasted, it really was!

And then…

Have you ever read one of those “How to make your marriage/relationship work” books that go “You can totally change some­one else!” No. Because you can’t. Fur­ther more, no one can change you. You can cer­tainly change your stan­dards, your val­ues, your dreams or desires to bet­ter suit your sig­nif­i­cant other, but if you aren’t will­ing to do that and you’re still bang­ing your head against the wall of love, honey, you’re just bang­ing your head against a wall.

Here are some uni­ver­sal truths for you:

• You have a soul mate.
• If you look deeply enough, you have about 6.91 bil­lion soul mates.
• No one is keep­ing you in an unsat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ship except your­self (I’m not talk­ing about abu­sive rela­tion­ships here, if you are being abused phys­i­cally, men­tally or emo­tion­ally, please seek help! You deserve better!).
• You are not required by the Uni­verse to love until it hurts. Or because it hurts. When you are bliss­fully happy, no one is going to look down on you for walk­ing away from a past relationship.
• You can walk away. You can run away. You can even not look back.
• You’ll be a bet­ter per­son for it.

I used to be one of those roman­tics that went down with the ship. If I was in love, that was it! I was sunk. And after talk­ing to hun­dreds of women (and hey, even a few men!) about their prob­lems, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that all that atti­tude gets you is sunk. Bet­ter to pad­dle a kayak through the sea of love and oh baby, there are a lot of fish out there.

I’m not say­ing don’t fall in love. I’m not say­ing don’t fall head over heels in love. And I’m not say­ing that if you’re rela­tion­ship is trou­bled it’s doomed. That’s the beauty of free-will. If it’s not in the cards, you’re free to fight against it or for it all you want. And that’s what I’m say­ing here — you decide all that fight­ing stuff. The power to fight and the power to say, nope, not gonna fight, are all in your hands.

And when you real­ize that, the Uni­verse opens up to you and the answers to the “Should I stay, should I go” ques­tions become decid­edly clear.