Breaking Up with Love

burning hope

I broke up with love this year. Not with all love, but with romantic love. At least with our society’s current version of it. Not out of anger, not out of disappointment, but because I’m just plain old DONE with it as currently practiced and understood.

For nearly seven years, I held space in my heart for it, I hoped for it. “It” being love involving an equal, adorable, adoring partner to build a messy, complicated, joyful, shared life with. I did all sorts of introspective work on myself. I built the sort of life I wanted to share. I kept my heart and mind open. I didn’t desire perfection in another, someone to complete or fill or fix me; I hoped for a man whose meshugas complemented my own.

And I came to realize that holding onto that desire, holding onto hope was killing me. OK, so it wasn’t killing me in a literal, physical sense, but it was killing my capacity for joy and for true gratitude. It was increasingly obvious that I was not going to find what I wanted. I wasn’t alone the whole time. My open heart and mind spurred me to experiment. I had a short open relationship with a verbally abusive, narcissist. I offered my healing services as a feminine amuse-bouche for men on the rebound, serving as a meaningless palate cleanser between their main course relationships because it’s a way to fill the long winter nights and because there is much to be learned from this sort of fling. I dabbled in just enough online dating to know that dating of any sort is not my cup of tea. I found myself dwelling on the Buddhist idea that desire is the root of suffering. I was tired of being tormented by my own hope, my own desire for what I didn’t have.

So I called a meeting of the coven I’ve put together on my island, a group of powerful women who meet up to make up our own spells, burn things in my back yard fire pit, and stay up late drinking and eating and talking and philosophizing and laughing around the candles on my long table. We met this time in the dark of the moon to burn things we wanted to leave behind, things we were done with, once and for all. Everyone had something to burn. I wrote “hope” on a 3×5 note card, then I spoke its name out loud and set it into the fire. I watched it curl up in the purple orange flames, turning to a sheet of ash.

The next day, I felt different. Lighter. Strange. Unencumbered by desire for love. I didn’t trust this new feeling to last or mean anything. The magic snuck up on me, then one day it hit me as a delicious, giddy realization a few weeks after burning hope. I was in my car at the 4-way stop in our town center, waiting for 3 couples to cross the road. One couple seemed to be new, in the whispering, hands always touching, glowing eyes, heady days of lust-becoming-love. One couple had obviously argued recently, each of them wearing a grim mask of civility but with that palpable chill that comes when you have a thorny issue between you. One couple had a newborn and a toddler, in those early days of parenting two children when you don’t have time or energy to think about much of anything, you’re just present in the moment be it sublime or wrenching. I watched all of these couples and I saw the merit it all of it and I wanted none of it for myself. For the first time, I was happy with what I had right then, happy in my bones and my heart and my mind. I did not hope for more. I did not want anything except to go on my merry, single mother way.

Now when I find myself with people who are in love, instead of longing for what they have, I feel lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Lucky not to be constrained in a relationship that requires me to limit myself, to constrict my views, emotions, intelligence, will, creativity, or humor. Maybe you’ve never made these sacrifices for love, but I used to. Now I am lucky to accept my life as it is without hoping for anything or anyone else.

This isn’t to say I’ve closed my heart off with a wall of defensive anger. I’m not afraid of pain, of the cracking of self that true intimacy fosters, of the chaos that comes with creating a shared life out of the complexities of separate adult lives and children. But I am done with the love I knew before. No more settling for less, no more ignoring my intuition, no more walking on someone else’s path and letting my own disappear behind, no more destructive constriction, no more fear of losing love. Once you know you can live without it, once you are happy without it, you realize that the only sort you’ll welcome if it happens your way is the sort that illuminates and strengthens. The sort of love that’s just for the sheer joy of it, between two truly equal, fully present people. I’m not at all sure we’re collectively capable of this yet, weighed down as we are with some bizarre internalized ideas of what love looks like, and what it demands of us. I leave it to the rest of you to sort that out. I’m enjoying the world I see now, without hope clouding my vision and blinding me to the beauty of life just as it is for me, nothing missing, nothing else needed than what I have.