Why Our Greatest Love Can Remain So Elusive

Second Chances gives us an opportunity to rewrite a different ending to a chapter in the story of our life that didn’t quite end as we would like it.  The ending I’ve been perpetually rewriting about is love. 

There’s a myth we are told when we are young that the love we are seeking is “out there.”. For some of us, it can take us the better part of our life to find it.  We date, marry, divorce, remarry, and start all over again and we are still searching.  There is an ache and a void. And when we do start the search again, we end up right back where we started.  It’s exhausting.

 If we are lucky self-love was modeled to us growing up and we learn it through a parent or other role model.  The vast majority of us, however, are taught that the love we seek is external and the way to receive it is through achievement.

The first great love of my life was my first husband Patrick. I met him at work the summer before my sophomore year in college.  He was 25, a software engineer from Ireland, and unlike anyone I had met.  He had a sparkle in his eyes and the ability to make anyone feel instantly at home.

I met Patrick at a time when I was still finding myself and he was a powerful distraction.  It’s a tricky thing when we are trying to have a relationship with two people at the same time. Inevitably one of you loses out.

Our courtship and early marriage years were fairly magical.  We traveled and enjoyed being fairly free of responsibilities, simply living day to day as many twenty-somethings do.  Looking back, I can also see that there was a certain immaturity to both of us. We were both fairly distracted from really knowing ourselves.

Three years after we were married,  I decided to take a job at a law firm in Washington D.C.  It felt like a bit of an abrupt departure from my still “fairly new” marriage,  but a necessary one.

 I can see now that my higher self was giving me a “do-over,” the chance to get to know myself free of the distractions of a partner.  I had gone right from college to law school and got married in the last year of law school.  During the eighteen months we lived apart, I began to claim a space in my life that was uniquely mine, outside of my role as someone’s wife or employee.

That time apart was a key catalyst in the journey of learning to love me. Slowly, I began to shed some of the old programmings I had inherited, that “together” was better than “alone” and that our value comes from how others value us. We all carry it with us whether from our family, our culture, our relationships or our profession. Then, at some point we hit the “reset” button on it.  

I began to formulate my own truth and my own understanding of what was important to me.

After eighteen months, I  moved back to Chicago and we started a family the following year.  The next decade was filled with growing our family and managing all the responsibilities that come with it.

Looking back, I will always be grateful for the seeds of self-love that my time apart allowed me to nurture. I'd like to say they blossomed right away, but that would be lying.  Over the next 5 years when two children and an ill-equipped partner who was battling his own demons were added to my full-time career, my default mode of overdoing took over. During the last five years of our marriage, my husband’s demons became even more present and it was largely me left to parent our kids along with everything else.

 What no one tells us in our twenties is that the love we are seeking is the love we have to give to ourselves. It can feel like the most elusive hidden treasure until we realize there’s a never-ending supply.  The truth is all we simply have to do is ask for it. That’s the step most of us forget.  

 When we spend enough time trying to fix another we break. After nearly 14 years of marriage and many years of trying to “save” the marriage, I was broken.

I have spent the last decade finally nurturing the seeds of self-love that I began planting at twenty- nine into sturdy saplings.

Patrick died last year from alcoholism. His death has left a void in mine and my sons’ lives. It’s a void that’s been waiting to be filled with forgiveness.

His death has finally given me a chance to transition from self-love to self-acceptance.  Over the last 8 months, I have spent a lot of time healing myself and learning to accept all the parts of myself.  I have finally learned to accept the 21-year-old part of me that is still learning how to prioritize loving myself along with the 39-year-old itself hat judged herself for staying too long.

 Venus is preparing to spend the next 3 months helping us to rework our connection to ourselves which shows up through relationships with others, to money and to our value system.

 We are being asked to move from self-love to self -acceptance.  I can feel something shifting

When we are trying to find self-love through relationship with another, life is painful.

Only when we let go of needing another’’s approval, are we truly free to come home to ourselves and a deeper knowing of who we are.