Finding the Love of My Life: Hint; There’s No Place Like Home
As a child I was sensitive and shy. While I would learn to manage my introvert inclination as I got older, my sensitive side would only strengthen in substance. An aesthetic that skews towards romanticism and classicism as opposed to the roughhousing and crudeness of my peers. I still don’t understand The Three Stooges.
Sometimes this would manifest itself as a sort of superior snobbery, e.g. Stewie Griffin, but that was just splendorous serendipity. Given the choice between listening to Barbara Streisand or Def Leppard, Babs each and every time. A love of love even if I didn’t really understand what love meant at ten versus thirteen.
Like so much about my teenage life, this sensitive side was not something I publicly shared with the world. A tender teenage secret of sentiment stingily shared with the select. No 1980s fourteen-year-old growing up in Midwest suburbia, would publicly profess their love for romantic ballads and torch songs. Scratching that itchy ear and indigo heart in private.
My journey to find the love of my life complicated with my realization at twelve that I’m gay. Another secret to add to my list of what not to share with the world. A secret that would ultimately undermine trust and undercut all my relationships. Learning later in life that secrecy corrodes love and rusts the heart.
Terrified of my secret love, I would abstain in my search to find the love of my life. My teenage and college years paralyzed by fear and petrified by shame. A young vibrant life lived as an old celibate man. I said goodbye to love and finding the love of my life.
But, like a rose beneath the bitter snows, hope would spring eternal and spring would emerge. Shedding shame, forgoing fear and forsaking false ideas about Love, I would once again search for the love of my life. That one person who would complete and compliment me. That one person who would be with me as a I exhaled my last breath and expressed my last kiss.
After years of living a less then authentic life, I was determined to discover my destined darling. Never once thinking that my expected expectations might be extraordinarily exceptional. Never once thinking that my love quest was only about quenching my ego. Never once thinking that maybe, the love that I sought was always in my heart.
My love junket would always dead-end itself usually through my own self sabotage. My search for love morphed into something that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with pleasure. Perplexed and puzzled by my lack of living a loving relationship of any length.
Like any false idol, I believed that all things are possible through people. That with the right relationship, I would find salvation, security and solace. When in truth, only with God are all things possible, including the love we all seek; eternal love that endures and encompasses everyone and all of earth.
Finally at forty-three this Don Quixote would finish his futile quest. Believing that I had finally found the love of my life. That I would never feel unaccompanied, unloved or unwanted. Like Don Quixote, I was wrong about everything I believed because I no longer believed in God.
Instead of bringing my burdens to God, I placed them on another human. Believing that this person would always be my better half, my eternal bastion of strength, my best forever friend. Disappointed when my expectations of perfection collided with everyone’s imperfections, including my own.
No one is perfect and no one can fully complete us. No person can be all things to us because no person can truly know our heart, but God does. In knowing our heart, God knows us. In surrendering your heart to God, you will find perfect Love. God is Love.
At fifty-five I would finally surrender my heart to God and find the Love of my life. This lost child rescued by his heavenly Father. This repentant brother redeemed by God’s only begotten Son. This son of humanity renewed by the Holy Spirit.
Like Dorothy Gale from Kansas, I never needed to go searching to find what I sought; that Love was already within my heart. A Love that knew me when He formed me in my birth mother’s womb. A Love that will always love me, I just needed to accept His gift of grace.
My wandering for the love of my life has ended. It’s now about nurturing my relationship with God, my one and only true love. With this realization and recognition, all my relationships have flourished and flowered because the Love within is meant to be shared with those outside of us. Helping others find the Love within themselves; leading others to the Lord of Love.