A Real Love Relationship Is Not A Fairy Tale “Happily Ever After” Story
A real, deep and growing love relationship brings up every wound , pain and fear from the past that needs to be healed as we face the challenges of daily life.
Photo Credit: Chinmayan
Finally, we are having a morning when sunlight streams through the windows as the heralding of a rare day without snow, sleet, slush or rain. We appreciate the sun so much after so many days of grey skies and storm, but we know from the weather reports that this is a temporary respite at best, because another round of storms are just days away.
We are not used to nor prepared for such severe weather as this. Though I know we are now living in a time when extreme weather is rapidly becoming the norm, we naively believed that it would pass our high mountain valley by, as it has so many times before. I remember watching the news of extreme weather clobbering other parts of the country and feeling a grateful kind of detachment because it wasn’t happening to us. Now that it has been happening to us for weeks, that detachment is long gone and replaced with a compassionate understanding because now we have been going “through wild winter ourselves.”
I am grateful that we have this tiny house as our ultimate refuge because every other space that we usually live in has had to be abandoned because it’s just too damn cold and therefore dangerous to be in for very long. Though we were well prepared for a “normal” winter, these conditions were far more challenging than any we have ever faced or had to deal with here.
Photo Credit: Chinmayan
Yesterday, when it was so severely cold, with falling rain and snow coming down far too fast to even think of going outside, we stay huddled here aboard this tiny house. This house is only 8 feet wide by about 29 feet of liveable space, which includes a small bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and main cabin/living room forward.
Its been hard on us, for though we are close, we both need large chunks of solitude of being just with our own selves every day, which normally is easily accomplished because we have separate living spaces and the huge building that is the meditation center and special spaces in the front and back gardens, all of which are not useable in the extreme cold.
We’ve made the couch in the main cabin, folded down into a bed for Ani’s place to sleep and relax and she’s made the dinette into her office space. It has taken us a few days to adjust and accommodate both of us and our separate needs here in tight quarters and we are still figuring out the best way to make it work.
I have made this tiny bathroom into my writing studio where I use the toilet lid as a chair, with a small folding table on the floor in front of me, and the books and journals and workbooks I need to write stacked on the vanity top. This allows me privacy behind the tiny closed door and gives each of us space and time apart. We do our best to see the humor in every challenging situation as a rule and this is no exception with saying that my current writing seat is like a would be king finally seated on his throne…
It is a fantasy to think that any relationship that is “good” will flow smoothly, with perfect communication and both of our needs being met seamlessly in a “happily ever after” situation. If we believed that is what constitutes a great relationship, ours would have been over when we had our first conflict.
Photo Credit: Chinmayan
But, our relationship has endured and endures because no matter what happens, what mistakes are made, what challenges we have had to face we always work it through and learn and change and come back together. We have had many dramatic conflicts which, if they were in a movie, would signal a dramatic “The End”, but we have endured because there is a core of pure powerful love that is our bedrock truth and even when everything else has been going down in flames, that core has always remained and enabled us to take responsibility for our parts for we know that “It takes two to tango”. We humbly apologize and ask forgiveness, get back on the horse and keep on moving up.
This situation of being forced by freezing circumstances to live together in this tiny cramped little house while storms rage outside has been a strain at points, which caused spats, which required us to stretch our patience and keep on figuring out how to do this better, day by day.
Both of us had childhoods that left us deeply wounded and we recognize that this relationship has been fertile ground for finally doing the messy and emotional work of inner healing that can only be done when pure love’s power is fully activated.
We both understand that this process of healing we are going through takes time, takes forgiveness, takes learning how to love to an ever greater degree, takes learning how to really communicate with each other and listen in a way that we are both really heard by the other.
I know I still have much to learn in terms of being one who can give her the empathy she needs when life is hard and we are both having physical, emotional and mental pain. But its worth it, its necessary and we are climbing this mountain together daily…and for that I am truly grateful.