Brenda Today my first guest appearance on Serious Laughs Podcast was released. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be a guest of the amazing ladies who run this hilarious, hard-hitting podcast. Thank you, Sheri and Molly!
I met Sheri through Medium.com where we both write. We became friends and after she read the post below, she asked if I would be their first guest. I am honored. The post below, What’s Love Got to Do With It is the topic. Check it out! And you can read the post below.
I searched my whole life for true love. Like the song, I was Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places. I didn’t take it quite that far, but it’s a well-known fact in my family. My Dad said once, “I worry about Brenda. She believes that there is this one person out there who will love her like she loves.” He wasn’t wrong. I have always believed that true love was possible.
The problem for me was that because of my upbringing, I didn’t know what real love looked or felt like. I kept accepting a facsimile of love that only hurt me. My persistence and belief, in some ways, hurt me more, but there were lessons to be learned.
Each one of the relationships I was in taught me something valuable. Lucky for me, there weren’t many of them. I was married to my first husband for 20 years. We had four beautiful children together, and then it was time to leave.
He wasn’t a bad man; he was as broken as I was. We hurt each other, but there were many good times, too. I learned from him that choosing to avoid pain doesn’t make it go away. It comes out one way or another. For him, it came out in anger.
My second husband, who I was with for ten years, also wasn’t a bad guy. I probably learned the most from this relationship. After years of motherhood and being ignored by my husband, I was ready for someone to take care of me. I took his overabundance of caring as love. It wasn’t. Not real love, anyway. It was control. He needed love and couldn’t love himself, so he used a form of love manipulation to meet his needs. It drained my vitality. He and I are still friends, but our relationship wasn’t furthering me, and it had to end.
For the next few years, I joined the dating pool. I went on dates, had a couple of longer relationships, and then gave up. I hadn’t lost my faith in love; I’d lost faith in my ability to recognize it. I had been burned. I’d trusted and then been surprised by the deviousness of others. And I’d healed.
The love I was attracting no longer looked like love to me. This was progress. I decided to change the patterns. Rituals have become important to me. They are a way of marking a change in the trajectory of my life. So, I did a ritual to release the old ways of love and make room for new ones.
On the night of the full moon, my intuitional time for manifesting, I wrote on a piece of paper all the old things that were no longer serving me. I wrote the hurts, the disappointments, and the anger. Then I burned it to ash. Once it cooled, I took the ashes to the forest and released them. The old ways were gone.
The next part of my ritual was to write a letter. I wrote a letter to my future man and told him that I was there waiting for him. I wrote about his character and what kind of relationship we would have. And then I closed my book and put it away.
It took one turn of the moon. And I didn’t believe it when he showed up. I told that story in another article, and you can read about it by clicking the photo below.
We have now been together for over three years. And what a ride it’s been, no pun intended. Although, yes, the chemistry between us is off the charts. But what’s even better is the love. We have both had to learn what true love looks like and what doesn’t serve us. The best part is we’ve learned together.
I’ve learned how to stand up for myself and put boundaries around what I will and won’t accept. He’s learned how to be a strong man and yet be soft with his woman. We’ve learned that love is forgiving, patient, understanding, and takes a lot of work.
Love isn’t a feeling. Love is a choice. We choose to love every day despite the little irritations that arise. And arise they will! We choose to laugh rather than get offended. We choose to smile and be patient rather than get irritated. And we choose each other every day. But what we can’t choose is to be perfect. So we get up every morning and make these same choices all over again.
Love is choosing your partner every day. Remembering the reasons why you chose them in the first place. I’ve heard it said that the things that once drew you to your partner are usually the things that eventually push you away. Why is that? I think it’s because it was their differences that were exciting. Once the excitement wore off, those things became irritating.
Irritation is easy, patience is not. Anger is easy. What’s not easy is choosing to be the partner you want your partner to be. If you both choose that, you will find the excitement again.
Love is a choice, and I choose love.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.William Shakespeare
