and I’ve got
no illusions about you
and guess what
I never did
and when I said I’d take it
I meant,
I meant as is
One of the first things my husband said to me when we started seeing each other was, “Don’t change anything you do because of me. I don’t ever want to be the reason you changed your life around.” At the time I didn’t realize what a huge gift he’d given me. But I have often thought about that gesture throughout our 16 years together.
There is a freedom in taking someone at face value. You’re not trying to change them, or thinking they will miraculously change, i.e. improve somehow. You just take them as is. Please don’t think for one minute that everything magically aligned for all time after those words were spoken. Of course I changed, I hid some things, I rearranged some things. That was part of my journey, that was what I was use to, this was how I normally behaved in a relationship.
The gift he gave me was that I could never blame him. Which meant I had to fix my own issues. I had to take responsibility for all the things I hid or rearranged. Jungians would say I had to take my projections back, he wouldn’t hold them for me. I was responsible for how I dealt with all the crazy stuff that came up for me in our relationship. That was his gift, he wouldn’t let me make him the scapegoat. Now I’m not saying he’s perfect, far from it, but he’s real. And there is always a way to deal with what’s real.
Rilke talks about the highest gift in a relationship, protecting the others’ solitude. I think that is a way of saying we protect who the other really is, down deep in their soul. We give the person we love the right to be who they are without them having to please or placate us all the time. We let them be who they really are, and we love them for who they really are.
It sounds so easy, but it’s so incredibly difficult to do. Relationships, and having a good relationship takes up 90% of what we talk about. It is the deep human connection we all seek but find so hard to sustain. Thousands of books are written on the subject, workshops and seminars are held. We suffer when that connection is broken or fails. What I do know is that the only person we can change is ourselves. When we stop trying to adjust someone else’s behavior and just accept them as they are, (and accept ourselves for who we really are), it’s a huge first step in a long journey.
This is not perfection, not a fairy tale. It is sort of a bruised perfection. It’s like in Moonstruck when Nicholas Cage says, “The fairy tales are all bullshit. Love doesn’t make everything perfect. It breaks your heart.”
And so it does. Especially if we can only love others for what they give us, instead of loving them for who they intrinsically are. Is it possible to love the people in our lives for who they are rather than what they have?
Here’s to loving all the people in our life as is.
kb
