I found this on another Forum and thought of you. Short background :the writer is a mentor on the site and had previously written a strongly worded letter regarding the hurtful behavior of the recipient's spouse, urging her to take care of herself in the midst of her DB-ing, as she was beginning to lose herself in the process. The mentor felt it necessary to write this as reminder of WHY we LBS-ers are doing what we are doing...
It's a 'poem' to unconditional love and it did my heart much good to remember that when my H peeks his head out and I am in a position to say I love you, it is and always has been from a deep, true place that asks nothing back in return. I know you know what THAT kind of love is all about!It's a long one but worth reading, so you might want that cup of coffee yourself this time!
"An addition to the above post… I realize that some of my posts as the one above seem to be radically different in tone to the majority of the ones I write. Before I stand accused of being two different people as I have been on other sites; I need to explain something of my views on relationships and the dynamics that MLC seems to bring out.
I believe in love…not the romantic love that fuels a multi-billion dollar wedding industry and has warped the perceptions of our society about the importance of BEING in love, the importance of feeling that spark that someone else is supposed to bring to YOU.
I believe in the pure love best expressed in 1 Corinthians, 13:4
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up. Does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; Does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. LOVE NEVER FAILS! “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these IS love. 1st Cor. 13:13
I first read this when I was about thirteen, while my parents were going through a bitter horrible divorce and it had a HUGE impact on me…watching two people literally willing to destroy each other and their children because they had “loved” each other and yet were so angry that neither of them were willing to act as if they did.
I knew that I was not willing to ever find myself in that position and when I read those words it seemed to me that I had found the key to making sure I never could. And so I put those words into my heart and began my journey….
Did my life turn out to be cotton candy and balloon hearts? No it did not…I suffered the pain of broken relationships, the heartbreak of finding that the ones who said they loved me were only willing to love so far and so long before their needs or my needs became too much to contend with. But…I was and am a determined person and I hung on to that vision, convinced that it was better to HAVE a vision than to give up and go with the flow. And as the years went by I stubbornly decided that if I had endured all the things I had and not given up then…well this time and the next time was NOT going to beat this concept out of me.
I met H 30 years later a man who had been abused and torn down in HIS relationships but who still had the light of belief burning in him that what he had to offer; while he had been rejected by all around him was still capable and willing to retain the capacity to believe, begin, and love again.
I demanded one thing of him…honesty….first and foremost….I told him that everything else could come out of that foundation, I promised him that I would NEVER allow the first flush of feelings and actions born out of our attraction and love for each other to fade…that I would never start to do something for him….bring coffee, send love notes, go for romantic walks, call him by pet names and then stop doing that as the relationship became more settled…in short the sandpaper of reality would never be allowed to take the first blush off our relationship. Every night when one of us was gone, there was a light turned on in the window to let us know that someone was waiting with love and anticipation for their return. He promised me the same and our journey together began…and the lamp was kept burning….
Until MLC came down around us we never spoke a word in anger to each other and he began only when he started cycling in and out of his fog. Does that mean that we were never angry? NO…we argued the issues we had to deal with but NEVER have we allowed our intense beliefs about the importance of what we were talking about to become personal. We are both highly driven, motivated, intense people; we throw everything we have into what ever we are doing and sometimes we have vastly different opinions on subjects but we never allowed that to interfere with our relationship.
We WORKED at making sure that anything that was a problem was worked out with respect for each other. Did he always like what I did or thought? NO but he loved me enough to try to understand. Did I always LIKE what he did or thought? NO but I respected and loved him enough to try to understand and so day by day we crafted a place where we could be heard and loved for who we were.
It was work, pure and simple but work that was glorified because of our feelings for each other.
It became very simple…I would bring anything to him that he needed or wanted even if that meant I went without and before the feminists start screaming their tired old cant….he did the same for me and with each of us willing to do that for the other, neither of us had to fight to get our own needs taken care of…they simply WERE.
I can’t tell you how many pieces of cheesecake had to be thrown out because neither of us was willing to take the last piece, knowing how much the other loved cheesecake. Does this sound over the top and silly? Perhaps, but it made for a wonderful caring relationship, one that protected both of us without either of us having to feel we were giving too much.
I believe in love, the highest expression of what we have to offer from a full heart, the putting away of our own needs in order to express love for another person. There was nothing I would not have done or tried in order to bring Newman back from that dark journey he found himself involved in but NEVER to the destruction of who I was and what I deserved as the person I am.
I was hurt, humiliated, in anguish and yes…angry about what was happening but I realized that those were my FEELINGS and MY reality, not his. I took those feelings to a counselor and two friends and dealt with them there so that those feelings would not intrude in the work H and I had to do in order to understand what had happened.
I offered him his freedom….I know my own value and I was not willing to debase that by trying to stay where I felt I was not wanted. He chose not to exercise that option but that did not make the situation any easier, he began to cycle in and out of intense anger and fear; anger because he felt guilty and my questions reminded him daily of what he had done and was expecting on some level that I would retaliate and fear because he felt he had so irrevocably damaged our relationship and it could only be a matter of time before I could no longer handle the pain I was feeling and would give up on him. And while we battled to understand how another woman could have intruded and all this could have happened to us both of us suffered.
If he treated me with disrespect…I left for a time….if he tried to fight with me…I declined the offer, I tried every way I knew to keep myself in a place where I could continue to refuse to be drawn into something not of my making. Was it easy? No, but every day it proved out to him that I DID care, DID love even when he could not understand why I would even want to try to feel that way.
Every moment of the day was filled with questions and every moment I gauged what I was doing and was still willing to do.
We over and over have the question asked on this forum…do I continue to tell him I love him even if I get no response? Well if from the beginning of your relationship you only EVER said those words to GET a response (“Love does not seek its own”) then the answer is a resounding NO…don’t waste your breath and your effort because you will get nothing back. It may have worked before but MLC has taken over and there is very little chance that there will be any attention paid to YOUR needs
But if you said those words as a pure distillation of the love you felt for him from the beginning then why would you NOT continue to say them? “Bears all things, (the pain and bewilderment) believes all things, (that the marriage is salvageable) hopes all things, (that the relationship you once had cannot have just disappeared overnight) endures all things (the turmoil of dealing with the complete stranger that seems to have inhabited your husband’s soul)”.
Love should not be expressed or spoken only when we get what WE need; it should be an expression of how we feel about the other person and if we have chosen well in our mate the same cannot help but be returned to us. “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these IS love.
From the beginning of this terrible time I equated what was happening to me as the equivalent of Alice falling down the rabbit hole…every object and emotion in my life had taken on a bizarre and twisted reality of it’s own, nothing was as it seemed and nothing was as it had been. It allowed me to give the circumstances their own reality, one that allowed me to let it be as much as I was capable of doing that in the moment; yet let me see that it WAS different from what it should be. For me that meant that I could handle what was happening in a different way that I was accustomed to, without being demanding, without resorting to tears, or letting anguish overwhelm me. I was a stranger in a strange land, without the language or customs to get me through as I would have had in my own country.
I have heard women on some of these sites talk about their “***hole husbands” and relate how they were never good men, good husbands or even good people and I wonder why they feel they are in such pain if their relationships were so terrible before. If it is their anger speaking now then what do they think these words and thoughts will do to make their situation better? If they truly believe this about their husbands then why are they not moving on to something else?
Could it simply be a case of “he’s MINE and NO ONE is going to take him away….I don’t have respect for him and don’t see why I should but no one ELSE gets to take him”? If so…how sad.
If it is simply their way of expressing their hurt then do they not realize that for the most part you GET what you express? Why is it that when the dating process first starts….this man is the center of your universe…they can see no wrong in him and they daily feel the need to express how wonderful they feel that he is even in their LIFE? What has changed so utterly for them that they feel they can now portray him as inferior goods? Is it not simply anger that they are not getting what THEY want? Love should never be situational…it should endure despite the daily abrasion of circumstances, not change because of them. And so if it is situational then those two people should not be together…marriage or not because if they stay trapped in that reality they simply make their lives dull and bitter…who needs it?
So, having said all that I have to say again….if you truly love someone, you must stay engaged in every way that becomes available, through an act of WILL if necessary. BUT…if you love in that way and it finally becomes apparent that your love is being used to damage you then it is time to go….and NO ONE can speak to anybody else of when that time will be.
It is far easier to become angered and hostile, far easier to attack and wound the person you love when you are not getting what YOU need than it ever would be when your needs are being met. Having said that…how does one keep to the higher path in spite of the pain?
By momentary acts of WILL…by momentary acts of love, by momentary acts of service to one who doesn’t even seem to care that you exist. Is it easy to do so?….no, never….because we never exercised that particular muscle when things were going well…but as in all exercise programs…what you practice, you become proficient at, what you exercise you become strong in and in doing so it does become easier.
If the person in your life is not getting what they need through this MLC mess…it probably began while having nothing to do with you, yet YOU are the one suffering along with the afflicted. It becomes a vicious circle, they do not feel they have what they need and so do not have enough to continue giving you what YOU need: you on the other hand have stopped getting what YOU need and so quite possibly don’t feel you can give them what THEY need any longer. This is a truth but the truth simply hurts if you cannot see what is happening to both of you from BOTH sides. That is the crux of the matter…what you can see from a position of lack and what you MAY be able to see and do from a position of love and the two exist in the same coin, each side is valid and yet each side is simply one side of the coin.
If you can bring yourself to stand on the edge of the coin and SEE that his reality is as real as yours then you as well as I will realize that no one is right and no one is wrong. Each is simply dealing with their own feelings and while they do that it is nearly impossible to hear the other.
So…I believe in love that will stand the test of fire but only as long as that love can be expressed while maintaining a position of knowing your own worth…knowing that what you are attempting to offer is of GREAT value and realizing that the value cannot be diminished simply because it cannot be recognized in the moment. Knowing that love expressed in this manner can very well move mountains but being willing to finally realize that the terrain will no longer support the effort needed.
I become angry (as my last two posts on this thread probably clearly indicate) when disrespect is shown to someone who is still valiantly battling to stay in the game and I see no reason why anyone should put up with this sort of abuse forever. However I can also see that it is possible to dodge the effects of the abuse and still keep trying to understand and repair if possible, past what anyone else would expect and more power to them if they feel they are still willing to do that. It was possible for me and so I cannot help but hope that it would be possible for others….
This is a bitter passage we have been called on to traverse, some of us will not make it, others will come through clothed in glory, together and stronger than ever but the one who don’t…even if their heart’s desire is never granted to them will NEVER be diminished by the effort expended in what they have struggled to do, to see and to understand and in their next phase of the journey, even if that means they travel alone will find that they have acquired the tools that will make their new lives something of beauty.
In this world the seasons come and go in their own time…each fulfills its own function, in its own time and our lives, if we could but step back for a moment and really see beyond our needs, will do the same. It does not matter how bitter the winter is…spring will come again and with it the endless possibilities of new growth."
