New endings, new beginnings

So another year has nearly slid by. And it’s been a momentous one. The most notable tales this year were ones of a love lost and new prospects. What to say about love lost? It was a slow train coming, that’s for sure. We were together a long time and, like most couples, we were by turns happy, angry, confused and resentful but in that final stretch – for five years or more – I hadn’t felt so isolated or sad or desolate since those interminable years of adolescence.

As our marriage plummeted we revealed our best and worst, we struggled in the embrace of a pain-body that plagued us day and night. I lost feelings of respect and admiration for my spouse and myself. I lost hope. I stopped trying. I felt misunderstood, unacknowledged, unappreciated. Most of all, I stopped believing in the idea of love.

I recall walking down a street looking at couples and asking myself: “How do they do it? How do they make it work?” At rock bottom, I believed that I didn’t know how to love (anyone) correctly. I told myself a story that my parents’ wounding gift to me was this: “We don’t know how love each other any more, so we’re passing it to you to solve.” And being unable to unravel it, I decided to do the best I could: instead of finishing the marriage badly, as my parents had, I resolved to end it well. I want my kids to learn that even if I couldn’t sustain a functional marriage, I was damn sure I’d show them how to leave one with respect and integrity, for myself and my spouse.

So far, we’ve managed to do this. We’re successfully negotiating the challenges of financial commitments, property settlement and co-parenting. We talk regularly about what we want and how to achieve it. We meet as a family, we attend school events and prize-givings and the odd social occasion together, for the sake of the kids. Our communication is less fraught and more positive and functional than it has been for a long time. I feel happy and I’m hopeful that it’ll continue to be so.

Managing these issues in this way moves me to believe in the idea that I can also commence an intimate relationship in the same positive manner: with candour, compassion, and trust. So meeting someone recently who is supportive and curious and (incredibly) intuitive has been as startling as it is delightful. I know, I know: rose tinted glasses! Love is blind. Brain gone to mush. My critical faculties have deserted me. All true, no doubt. And yet, I find myself trusting my intuition more these days. I’m learning to give greater reign to instinct. To gut-feeling. To that unnameable sense that if it feels okay, it is okay. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink! is serving as my spiritual/intellectual guide, lest anyone judge that I’m simply another hapless, lovelorn, middle aged single male on the rebound . . .