Dating : Falling in Love Is Everything the Poets Promised

For over a decade, I worked to breathe life into a fraught, difficult relationship that never grew. Married at twenty-one but struggling ceaselessly in my partnership, I listened to the chorus of elders around me: “Marriage is difficult. Love isn’t easy. Relationships take work.” Lacking much experience with love, I stood my ground. I wanted love so badly, but it always seemed just outside my grasp.

Without a steady foundation of friendship and trust, even a gentle wind shook my marriage and brought up questions of its validity. However, years passed, and I resisted these doubts out of stubbornness and fear.

Facing daily contempt, control, and criticism, I finally gave away my considerable library of marriage and relationship self-help books and took a a leap of faith that had seemed unimaginable for a long while. I left.

Determined to avoid my past mistakes and create a healthy partnership, I researched the science of trust and attachment in earnest, hoping to become a worthy partner and choose wisely in the future. But no amount of introspection, study, or conversations with friends and family members about relationships could have prepared me for the true wonder of deep love.

I hadn’t expected to find this kind of connection, but here he was, looking at me with honest-to-goodness gold eyes, full of humor and humility and kindness. His presence seemed to stop time, and he observed me with a kind of approval and affection that amazed me and began to change the way I viewed myself.

A year into experiencing deep love and partnership, the kind I had deeply desired for many years but that fell out of reach, I am utterly struck by the magic of it. It is a living, breathing thing in need of joyful, thoughtful tending, but that effort is pleasurable. Conversations do not end but rather pick up where they last left off, and the trust between us is absolute. I know in my bones that I could trust this man with my life, and that knowledge deeply settles me.

This love is a force of nature to be honored—like the pull the moon has on the tides, like birth and death, like monsoon season. Growth naturally proceeds from it, and the resulting growing pains are not suffering; they are productive labor pains. There is a spiritual aspect in the wonder of having someone who mirrors my love with equal intensity, the wonder of having found this person at all. And it encourages a kind of ego death, since I desire the happiness and well being of my beloved in a way that transcends my attachment to him.

Love — falling in love — is everything the poets promised. In Kahlil Gibran’s words, I wake every morning “with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” I hold my beloved’s face in my hands, fingers hidden in his wavy salt-and-pepper hair, and feel a sense of oneness with everyone, past and present, who has ever loved someone utterly, passionately, and without reservation. This has been worth the wait.