In the past months I’ve been feeling like a failure, over and over, day in and day out: I feel that I’ve failed in every aspect of my life, professional as well as personal.
I still feel that way. And this sense of failure is sometimes so overwhelming that it is paralyzing.
I truly do believe I have failed at everything I have tried. But at least now I know that I have had true love. And in that sense I have been more fortunate than many people.
I had it three times, and eventually turned away from it all three times. As bell hooks wrote in her wonderful book All about love, “Not everyone can bear the weight of true love”. As she (& Erich Fromm & M. Scott Peck and many other insightful thinkers) wrote, love is not just a feeling: love is an action, a verb, a choice. In bell hooks’s (& Erich Fromm’s & M. Scott Peck’s) words: “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients — care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, knowledge, and trust, as well as honest and open communication”; “Love is an act of will [… ] the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”.
Using John Welwood’s distinction between a “heart connection”, which is a type of attraction that is familiar to most of us, and a “soul connection”: “A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other’s individual natures, behind their façades, and who connect on a deeper level. This type of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension — seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence.”
The first time I found true love I wasn’t even nineteen and I (& he) went into it with the instinctiveness of teenagers (he was sixteen). But despite our young ages all the ingredients of true love were there, they really were there — maybe they were there, and we were able to truly love each other, precisely because we were so young and “innocent”, still dreamers, not yet too hurt or wounded or disappointed or disillusioned by life.
The second time I was twenty-four. At that point my partner & I were a little more disillusioned but still had the hope, or will, to love.
The third time was just this year, at forty-one.
All three times I (we) knew it was true love and I (we) chose it. Yes, all those authors are right: the initial feeling of attraction/infatuation then transformed and led to active choices of loving.
But each time I eventually walked, or turned, away.
And now I don’t know what to think: should I add this to my list of failures? or should I see it as a blessing or as at least one thing that I have had, that I do know how to do despite all the trauma & brokenness in me?
[NOTE: when I say here that I found “true love” three times I am referring to a very specific type of love, namely romantic love; but I don’t believe that’s the only type of true love that is possible. In fact, if I consider close non-romantic relationships in my life, then I think I’ve encountered platonic true love more than three times and am still finding & maintaining it in several non-romantic relationships.]
The Little Prince and the Fox 