OK, I give in! The air is full of love and romance today, and who am I to resist!
Love, Romance, and Focusing
“He loves me, he loves me not…” and the image of a lovestruck girl picking the petals from a daisy… This was me, often, in my adolescence. I was desperately interested in whether HE loved ME.
But what I didn’t realize, and didn’t have any help in realizing, was that I really should be much more interested in whether I loved HIM.
I smile as I think about time-traveling back to my younger self and sitting with her as she learns to sense how SHE feels, as she learns to acknowledge the subtle and sometimes confusing cross-currents of feelings about the guy co-starring in the high school play who she never got the courage to talk to off stage.
I see now that “having a crush” — which seemed so full of emotions like love and despair — was actually a way of NOT really being in touch with how I felt.
And today, as I sit down to write a Valentine’s card to my partner Joe, I smile again as I take time to feel the rich, complex, subtle strands of feelings I have for Joe, changing from day to day. My life is so much more enriched by being in touch with all that, than if I just called it “love” and never examined it again.