love

For the past 5 years, I have been searching for my "next" husband. I'd gotten divorced and obtained an annulment after almost 30 years of marriage and I wanted to move on. I thought the way to move on was to remarry. Believe me when I say I looked everywhere for "the" man. I tried every singles website (I joke that I flunked eharmony...all I ever received from the site were men who lived in distant places), I asked friends to introduce me to their single men friends, I prayed for him to walk in the door, a la a knight in shining armor, I looked over every single man at Mass, I casually checked out men's ring fingers when I was out and about. I had lots of first dates, even several deep relationships that were destined to go nowhere and I would have realized it at the very beginning if I hadn't been enamored with the idea that the man of the moment might be "the one". Instead, I hung in sometimes, figuring we'd work it out together. I was rejected by several men, although some have remained friends of mine and the others didn't really understand who I was and so rejected their idea of who I was, which was a false rendering of me. (It still hurt even when I knew that they weren't really rejecting the real me but their skewed idea of me.) I learned that the men my age whom I'd met came with a ton of hurt from previous relationships and seemed to be reluctant to do anything but carry it around with them, infecting new relationships. Finally, I gave up my search and found something much, much, much better. One day, I will share the details with you. For now, it's still a beautiful work in progress.

In my endeavors to find a man, I don't think I was that different from my clients. My clients seem to look for love in all the wrong places, too. While they don't seem to value marriage the way I do, they do tend to attach themselves to men who are not healthy and who treat them with great disrespect. I try to challenge their thinking, hoping they'll see that they are worth far more than they think and they certainly don't deserve abuse. None of us deserves to be abused at the hands of another person. Blessedly for myself, I have a very healthy self-esteem and don't tolerate abuse for long. (Amazingly, men whom I'd never met in person thought it was okay to scream at me via email, text messaging and phone. Their arrogance and anger, which had a history way before they met me, together, were quite a force that I never came to understand but refused to be a part of for long.) I wish I could help my clients understand better that they are't to blame for abuse and they don't have to be victimized by it EVER.

What I've surmised is it all comes down to our human nature's quest to find love so we will be able to love and be loved. It hearkens to our innate longing for God and to be in relationship with other human beings...in essence, to follow the two greatest commandments: to love God above all others and to love one another. In the end, I believe the old adage that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all for it seems to me that our actions of love are much more important than being loved. Loving helps us to grow closer to God. It helps us to live fully. It teaches us to take our own selfishness out of the picture. And, the lessons learned in every situation become a part of the fabric of our being and help us to be more like the way Our Lord calls us to be. And, that is a very beautiful thing!