Love, Solitude, and balanced Relationships

There are so many varied thoughts and ideas that arise while in solitude.  Those most persistent are related to past relationships.  I should have done this better, or maybe I should have done that instead.  Was I right or was I wrong.  Ironically, if I am in the dumps about a failed relationship, the mind paints me as a hero that did all he could do but just wasn’t enough.  If I feel good after the relationship ends, my mind makes me feel heartless and uncaring.  Neither perspective is true.

I didn’t always do things the right way, and I loved every single woman that I have been in a relationship with, but even though my actions were clumsy at best sometimes, the action still needed to be taken.  How can you do anything but what your heart prompts you to do, even when you are immature and emotionally charged, the end result will be what it is intended to be whether gracefully accomplished or roughly executed.

Often when I think back about certain relationships there is this aura of goodness and perfection that hovers over the memories of my partners.  My mind creates an image of them that is saintly and kind when that perspective is only half of the reality I experienced.  Many times I remained in the relationship, even when in my heart I knew it would eventually end in disaster.  Walking away as friends was a better trajectory for me than to stay and end up becoming enemies.  But I felt obligated to keep trying, even when there was no real movement from my partner to build a lasting bridge of communication between us, sometimes I just kept on trying.

Now as I sit here in solitude once again, it feels very much like there can be no alternative.  I am so different, my perspectives outside of most cultural or social understandings, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.  Once you know something, it changes your every perspective and determines even your motivations in life.  As many relationships as I have had, there was love at the beginning, a struggle for balance and peace in the middle, and heartache and pain in the end.  

Love in relationships is mostly unbalanced, and in that state, it is easily upset.  If you have a great love for someone, that love also requires you to be prepared for the opposite swing of the emotional pendulum.  As great as the love is, individually or mutually, it is only one side of the coin.  Allow for the pendulum swing, be prepared to be hurt or to hurt another, but understand that is where love is grounded.  Not in the heavenly moments, but the moments of utter chaos and hell.  If love was never there, the roller coaster ride can become unbearable.  If love is there, the swings and drops of the coaster ride become the leaven for the bread that sustains the life of the relationship.