On love

I’ve always been obsessed with love stories.

Gone with the Wind. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. Moulin Rouge.

I’ve watched and re-watched Pride and Prejudice more times than I care to admit.

I even made my ex boyfriend memorise parts of Romeo & Juliet when he lost a bet.

Ever since I was a little child, I craved and prayed for a love like that.

An unconditional love that would never fade. A forever relationship. Something I could trust with my whole being. Something I could hold and be held by. A deep soul-recognising bond that would anchor my partner and I through life’s ups and downs (intense for a little child, I KNOW).

However, inevitably, even in those stories someone would drink poison, cheat, murder… It was crushing. Devastating. I felt personally wounded.

And it was even worse if I looked around in real life: divorce, manipulation, separation, people promising ever-lasting love and walking away the next day.

So that love started to feel like this magical unicorn I would dream about and then wake up to the fact that it didn’t belong to this human realm. That I would never find it, no matter how long I looked for it.

And so again & again my heart would break. And grieve. And I’d resent myself for wanting it. And yet secretly still yearn for it.

And it’s taken me many years to finally start to realise that I was asking an impermanent world for something permanent… it finally dawned on me that the love I was seeking for was never going to be met by a human relationship. It needed to come from another place entirely.

From my experience, this type of love can only be found in the divine. In that fundamental energy that is inside me, inside you, inside everything you see.

And even if my mind still wants to hold on to the dream of a life-changing ever-lasting relationship, my soul knows what I’m really hungry for will never be satisfied by any partner.

So I have taken the practice of turning to God/Goddess/Universe for that love. In the trees. In the scent of fresh roses. In the stranger that smiles from the other side of the street. In my breath. In my body. And sometimes, in some rare still moments I can almost hear the wind whispering love poems to whoever is present enough to listen.