Welcome to Big School

For a long time now, I've understood that life is just Big School; in essence, everything you experience is an opportunity to learn something. Sometimes the lesson is a big lesson that startles you and changes your course in some way, sometimes it's so small and subtle you won't even realize you've learned something until long after the fact. But if life is Big School, relationships are Master Class.

I can honestly say I've never had a relationship that didn't teach me something, although sometimes it was a repeat lesson ("Men Like This Are Not Good for You" seemed to take awhile to get through and thus bore repeating far more times than one ever would have believed absolutely necessary). But looked at as a whole, the most important lesson I have learned from my relationships is this:

There is only one person on earth who can make you happy ...
...and that person is You.

There is an equally-important corollary lesson, namely: Perception is Everything.

I'll probably get a lot of shit for saying this, because this is a really hard lesson to learn and lots of people really don't want to hear it. It's easier for us to put the responsibility on someone else, especially when we are hurting: he broke my heart or she is upsetting me. That's certainly not to say that you aren't suffering a broken heart, or that you aren't upset. It's likely that if you're feeling this way, you truly believe someone else is the cause of your agony; Goddess knows I wasted a lot of my life convinced of it. But it's important to step outside of this circle and ask questions that are meaningful and be clear before we assign responsibility, because where we assign responsibility, we also assign power. Taking back that power is scary, because it involves giving yourself permission to be and do and feel all kinds of things you may have just spent a lifetime telling yourself NOT to be and do and feel.

One of my own personal stumbling blocks was an intense belief that I wanted someone to "take care of" me. Somewhere along the line I had become convinced that a person who loved me would in fact perform this function—not too unreasonable an expectation if one is thinking of mutuality and safety and trust, but of course I had my own largely-uncommunicated very special definition of what that involved. It should be no surprise to anyone (although it was always a total surprise to me) that the string of astonishingly dymanic beautiful hyperintellectual long-haired guitar-playing egocentric Bad Boys to whom I was attracted never quite made the grade. In fact, they generally landed somewhere closer to the "what was your name again?" edge of the spectrum rather than on the spot marked "My True Love." I began to recognize them as a type, which I laughingly labeled GSNF (Great Sex, No Future). But even though I could spot them a mile away and really knew what to expect from them (er, that would be nothing much), I remained hopeful ... and hurt ... much of the time.

I gradually figured out that it was my responsibility to choose a type of man who was actually emotionally equipped to give me what I needed. So, good for me, the first part of the lesson was learned. But remember there's a corollary lesson. To make a long story short, my perception of what I needed was dramatically different than the reality. And once I found someone who wanted to take care of me in a way that met my specifications, I suddenly discovered that I really didn't want that at all.

I have moved past that particular stumbling block for now, but there are always more lessons waiting in the wings (or, as my groovy astrologer calls them, "more goddamn growth opportunities"). I wrote a bit about this earlier, in the post entitled Great Expectations; my current challenge is wrestling with my own expectations of "marriage" and "love" and "passion" versus the reality of those things. I'm a little bit nervous to think that my marriage (and love and passion) will really be for me only what I make it, but I'm trying to be excited too, because with this responsibility comes the power to construct relationship in a way that is truly meaningful to me, in a way no one else can make it.

Assignment: Take on the challenge of your own life. Dispense with panic. Consider perfection. Don't forget to breathe.

—E. Marie