Looking For Love, and Finding It!

I have been doing a cringe-worthy dance with love ever since grade school when this girl named Sandra came to the neighborhood and became the reason for every erratic beat of my nerdy heart. Of course back then, I had no idea what love was. All I knew was that whenever I saw her, my heart would beat a little faster, I couldn’t remember how to form words, and I miraculously managed to become even more awkward than usual.

I pathetically mooned over her for years, and never once even attempted to tell her how I felt, so it should come as no surprise that nothing ever happened between us. Thirty five years later, I might have figured out how to speak to the opposite sex, but I’m still working on a true understanding of what love is. Not only do I believe that love is something entirely different to every person, but I am also positive that my perception of love is constantly evolving. The love I felt when I was in my 20's and 30's is not a love I would even want today. However, it was exactly what my heart told me I needed back when I was on my own for the first time and trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. It begs the question: Did I get smarter about love, or did my heart finally catch up with my brain?

My therapist really liked to ask: “Do you accept the love you think you deserve?” He would pose that question so often, at first I assumed he earned a commission for each time he worked it into one of our sessions. While his query got under my skin in the beginning, over the past couple of months, I’ve come to realize that the question cut right to the heart of why I was in therapy. My overactive imagination believes that a seemingly infinite number of things have eluded me in life, but my mind can focus just long enough to discern that I was Captain Ahab, and that love has clearly been my great white whale. I’ve searched for it for longer than I care to admit, and I even thought I found it on a few occasions. Yet that one true love somehow remained bitterly elusive.

I kept pounding my head against the wall and wondering why true love was so hard to find. What I should have been doing was pondering my therapist’s favorite question. When I got married, I most certainly did not accept the love I deserved. I settled for the love that was offered and convinced myself that I was the happiest man in the world. We were not a good match but we had latched onto each other, so I was thrilled to lock down ‘til death do us part, the version of love she put on the negotiating table. It wasn’t a shock that the end of my marriage came long before death interceded. After my divorce, I was so lonely and broken-hearted that I made foolish and desperate decisions when it came to affairs of the heart. This led to relationships that no hopeless romantic in their right mind would ever accept. I was not accepting the love I deserved because I no longer thought myself worthy of love.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to make some major changes. I had been unhappy for so long that I simply came to accept it as the way my life had to be. To be perfectly honest, I had no concept of how miserable I became and the effect it had on those around me. I readily admit that change scares me. I am an introverted creature of very bad habits who puts up walls, keeps people at a distance, and is petrified of the consequences of giving love another chance. Sure, I moan and groan to whatever friend was unlucky enough to be within earshot that I wanted to be in a relationship again, but they were empty words. My brain remembered what to say, but my heart had long since forgotten how to give those words any deeper meaning.

When someone so obviously different from anyone I’ve ever known wandered into my life, in my head I was in the absolute worst place to even consider the love that I deserved. As it was my modus operandi, I just assumed she would hurt me like all the others, and without even realizing it, I would fight the love that was being offered, taken it for granted, and scared it away before it even had a chance to change me. Luckily, the jarring loss of what could have been was enough to awaken me from my self-induced coma of romantic stupidity. Apparently, my heart had a great white whale sighting. True love had presented itself and I surprised myself by deciding to chase after it with reckless abandon. Now because I wasted so much time being miserable and ensuring that love could never find me, I was not in a position to be loved, nor should I have been asking anyone to love me in return. 

I finally came to terms with the fact that I needed to change drastically, and not because of the love I wanted, but because I needed to be happy and lead a rewarding life. Luck must have been with me because after I put in a great deal of hard work, which is far from finished, I found my great white whale smiling back at me. After all these years, my search was over. Not only was I finally able to accept the love that I thought I deserved, but she also accepted the offer of my oft-broken heart.

Reflecting back upon it now, perhaps I never accepted the love I thought I deserved because my heart was holding out for the woman who now possesses it. At last I’ve found true love, and I am completely confident that I deserve it...