The thing is, I never wanted to be in love more than once. I'd never wanted to want to marry more than one person. I've always known that if I make that decision, it will be it. I went into it, not thinking it'd be it, but searching out if it could be. In all the textbook ways (and I mean, really trained not stereotypical, romanticized ways) it relationally had what it takes [to go the distance, as they say]. Neither of us are perfect, of course, - I've never heard of such a couple - but together it was good. I couldn't have imagined getting along with a guy I was dating so well (mostly because everyone says what hard work it is), but so it was. It didn't take long for being with him to feel comfortable and safe and warm, like home. So I struggle to let go of wanting to go home - to think about making home somewhere else.
Maybe it just takes time. It has, after all, healed me of my Dark, Dark Place and is healing me of my weakness and insecurities. Maybe time, too, will smooth over my longing for things to just return to comfort and ease.
In one of my favorite films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there's a clinic for ex-lovers to erase one another from memory. Only hangup is Joel grapples with the decision to remove Clementine while the process is taking place. Similarly, I'm not convinced I want time to heal me of missing "home". I grapple with feeling as though really, I can't imagine finding someone I feel that way with; have that connection with. And yet, several big things in my life would drastically change to be with him. So I am, within myself, at a stand still. A stalemate, if you will, of the head and the heart. I just want to be home, but I'm not sure it can be my home anymore. Saving grace is that the pain of having settled into it as such, as home, has decreased and is decreasing. Yet, the desire to go there remains.
If I'm honest, a part of me is confused: should you be able to want to make more than one person in life your person? You've certainly heard the saying, "The heart wants what it wants." Well, I wonder, if my heart ever wants anyone else again, could it even be true? So it must be, that lifelong commitment is not simply a matter of the heart, but a decision; to dive in together, for life, in love. But I fear if I love another, it won't make this love any less a part of my life, rather it will just be a different choice. I never wanted that, to go the opposite direction my heart was.
I've been reading Donald Miller's Scary Close, and in it he says:
To hear her voice and smell her hair and remember half the feeling of home is usually a person.
You know, in the end of the movie (spoiler alert), Clem & Joel meet again after they've mutually erased one another. They're drawn to each other again, and with the fear that history will simply repeat staring them in the face, they stare back and decidedly say, "Okay."
I quietly wonder, what will we say?
