Dating : Here Is the Moment When You Lose Your Lover

To love your lover is to love their dreams.

“I can’t wait for you to get this childish hobby out of your system!” Marie shouted as Harry laid on the floor, wrestling with one of his students.

And with that, she stormed out of the gym in a huff.

Harry looked embarrassed…as if his mother just told him he was too old to be still playing with GI Joe’s.

As students, we weren’t used to seeing our action-hero smacked down like this. There was an awkward silence for a few breathless seconds. To break the tension, I tossed our instructor an easy question about one of the grappling techniques he did earlier.

And Harry snapped right back into his true passion: teaching martial arts.

By day Harry worked as a computer technician, but four nights a week, he was one of the top martial arts gurus in the south.

Harry was part of an elite squad of martial arts experts from the school of Jeet Kun Do (JKD), founded by the legendary Bruce Lee. And he taught the JKD system at night in an upstairs room at the local gym.

Harry had spent his whole life studying martial arts, and he was gifted at it. His octopus mind and limbs just thought in terms of foot placement, pivots, knots, rotation, and flow.

Although he was not a violent person, Harry knew how to fight standing up, on the ground, in tight quarters, with sticks, knives, and even everyday items like a lampshade, newspaper, or t-shirt.

Harry was a badass superhero!…Until his wife showed up.

Harry was handsome without even trying. However, his last breakup was tough on him, and he wanted to take some time to get to know himself better.

But when Marie walked into the room with her friend to try a free introductory class the gym offered members, Harry took notice.

Although she had little interest in studying martial arts, she was interested in getting to know Harry. He was her type of guy: strong, polite and, protective with that boyish-looking face and piano-key smile.

And Harry liked Marie too.

While she never took another one of Harry’s classes again, Marie was at the gym three days a week and would often drop by Harry’s studio to watch him teach.

And that’s when Harry met Marie.

They began talking every day, which eventually led to a serious dating relationship.

While Marie was all about climbing the corporate ladder, Harry was more of a Zen Buddhist. He was into fitness and health. But he also had a knack for figuring out complex puzzles — whether it was wiring a network server or trying to escape from an ancient Greco-Roman wrestling move.

Harry was content with his life as is. But if Marie had any chance of getting her established parents to approve of Harry, she’d have to clean him up a bit and get him on a better career path.

So she went to work.

Once they got engaged, she insisted Harry go back to school to finish his computer science degree. She then called some friends to help him get a better paying job with a large tech company. And she changed his wardrobe from sporty gym gear to slacks and buttoned-up dress shirts.

Not only did Harry take on a new look, but a new identity as well. However, a core part of him remained rooted in martial arts, and he continued training and teaching it at night.

Because of the gym’s location downtown, his students were mostly high profile lawyers, bankers, and other professionals. Not only did they revere Harry, but they also wanted to be like him. But ironically, Marie wanted Harry to be more like them, The Professionals.

Harry’s dream was to open a dojo school of his own someday. But he’d put all that on the back burner as their marriage plans and the purchase of a new home became a top priority.

However, once things settled down, Marie’s next project was to get him to move past that “silly, Kung Fu hobby,” as she liked to call it. And she wasn’t shy about letting Harry and others know that “it was time for him to grow up.”

Harry was an easy-going guy. He didn’t need to be on top or in-charge.

However, Marie did.

She called most of the shots in the relationship. And Harry was compliant with her requests, except the continual hinting for him to “graduate from martial arts and become an adult.”

Her light-hearted jokes about Harry’s passion were cute, at first, but got more acidic as the relationship progressed. When she’d make fun of his hero, Bruce Lee, in her racially insensitive “Hi Karate!” caricatured voice imitation, it disturbed him at his core.

But he was no match for her wit or her high school champion debate skills. Instead of protesting, he began to share less of his dreams and passion with her. And he found a more receptive audience in his high profile students. They knew more about what was going in Harry’s life and head than did his wife.

We all want someone who “get’s us.” But when our significant other doesn’t respect our dreams, they can lose vital parts of us, even if we stay in the relationship.

On the day Marie came into the class to dress Harry down for the hundredth time, something changed in Harry. As she blew up, he checked out.

And that’s the moment that Marie lost Harry.

Over the four years of their marriage, Marie was on an aggressive campaign to transform Harry into something he didn’t want to be. And they fought about these competing visions for Harry’s future a lot.

But none of this mattered anymore because Harry came home that night and asked Marie for a divorce. And as much as she tried, she couldn’t get the old agreeable Harry back in her arms.

He was gone.

When I asked Harry what happened, he said,

“A lover must give up a lot of his selfishness in a relationship, but not the nucleus of their dreams. For anyone who truly knows me and cares about me, martial arts define who I am and what I’ve dreamed about my whole life. While it may have seemed childish to her, it meant everything to me.”

“Some doctors have a passion for curing diseases, and some engineers want to build the largest bridge span. I want to spend some portion of my life studying martial arts.”

“But she hates that part of me, which means she hates the real me. And it also means she doesn’t know me or get me at all. The person she wants me to be requires that the person I am has to die. And I can’t seem to kill my dreams, even as much as I’ve tried.”

And that’s when Harry divorced Marie.