For the last 15 years, I have been love stuck, love dumbfounded, love empty, love hurt and at the same time still in love with a past partner that was not in love with me but pretended with conviction they were! Confusing, I know, especially for me! By the time I figured it out and only after I took stock of their repeated cheating and lying, did I realize, that relationship had damaged me emotionally. I have not been able to trust or love anyone since. Hence my love stuck and love emptiness!
At first, I got stuck questioning why would anyone pretend to love you for years? Then I got stuck questioning why would anyone cross an ocean several times to be with you to only continue to have affairs with the ones left behind?
No satisfactory answers ever came out of that other than me sitting on the love fence waiting for some kind of enlightenment and redemption to come, one that would relieve me from my pain and distrust. But like most things that keep you stuck, I had asked the wrong questions which of course, only led me to the wrong answers! Focusing for years on what my partner did or did not do to me only camouflaged my own need for freedom and the role I played in that relationship when I was in it. Sitting on the love fence was a choice which unconsciously allowed me to remain unattached, immune from possible hardship and free. As much as that was attractive and enticing, especially at the beginning, it was not long term, as it only made my heart close and become even more impenetrable and irredeemable!
A quote from CS Lewis on Love says it best:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”