What Truly Matters More Than the Capacity to Love?

You can also read this article in Psychology Today here

This is Part Three of a four-part series titled “You Cannot Be Abandoned.” You can find Part One here.

A year and a half after Karla left me that third time, I returned to Mexico and deliberately did not see her until two days before my return date to Washington, DC. Karla and I met for dinner for what I thought was to reach closure and solidify our friendship. 

Heart versus Mind 

The next morning I drove to the gym. On my way home, I broke down into tears. I couldn’t stop crying. I realized that I still loved her and knew this would be our final goodbye. 

Then I experienced a feeling, a new feeling I had never felt before, about her. Although she had left me three times and I had spent the past eighteen months convinced that, for that reason, we had no stable future together, I realized that all of that emanated from my mind and that my heart had never stopped loving her. 

I acknowledged that we had grown up in different cultures, and that someone leaving their boyfriend or girlfriend in Mexico so the other person can realize what they have lost and make a long-term commitment, if they believe the other person is right for them, is much more common there
than in the US. I recalled the sage words of M. Scott Peck in his groundbreaking book The Road Less Traveled: “When there is not commitment, there is confusion.”

Those words more or less summarized the previous three and a half years of our lives. I had always known I wanted to marry her. Yet I had wanted us to go slowly based on how I had grown up, based on watching the only love I knew, the love of my parents toward each other, disintegrate in front of my eyes. I realized, in that moment, that I had my narrative about our relationship and she had hers. 

It’s How I See It

As I drove home from the gym with tears streaming down my face, my heart opened a window in my mind. I could finally see our story from Karla’s perspective: my formula—date for two years so I could feel we were stable, and then propose to her—didn’t account for her leaving everything she knew in Mexico and coming to the United States. 

In Mexico she directed two psychology clinics and was so popular with her clients that hundreds of families routinely gathered at her parenting workshops. Then she came to the US, for me. She had no job and enrolled in an English course at a local language institute in Washington, DC. 

Leaving a culture where she was highly valued, Karla came to the US, where she was not. She could bear all the humiliating changes in her life as long as she knew she had a solid commitment from me to create a family with her. 

I wanted us to be together for at least two years to feel secure that
I could provide that commitment. Our timings didn’t match,
and she left. Repeatedly.

Introduce Yourself to Reality

Acceptance has been defined by Harvard Medical School psychologist Christopher Germer as a willingness to “let things be just as they are the moment we become aware of them, accepting pleasurable and painful experiences as they arise.”

In a similar vein, State University of New York psychologist Edelgard Wulfert, in her work on acceptance as a crucial step in treating alcoholism, refers to it as a willingness “to face difficult situations and tolerate whatever feelings come up.”

Acceptance is also a critical ingredient of mindfulness. Meditation guru Tara Brach refers to “radical acceptance” in her book of the same name as a thorough willingness to experience whatever transpires in each moment of your life.

What element of your daily reality have you had trouble accepting in
your life?

Your Greatest Teacher

After returning from the gym, visualizing our story from Karla’s perspective changed everything. Arriving back at my house, I instinctually became aware that if I were to demonstrate my long-term commitment to her, which I had never been able to do before, she would be a good wife and would not leave me after we had children together. 

That meant that perhaps it was safe, after all, to stop judging her as unstable and to give her what she would finally need, hopefully, to flourish and to be stable in our relationship.

I walked down the stairs into my living room, picked up the phone, and called her. She answered after less than a tenth of a second; she was also dialing me. 

Higher than Forgiveness or Gratitude 

“Can we talk?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. A pause.

“Shall I come over?” she asked.

“I still love you,” I said when she arrived at my door.

“I still love you too,” she replied.

“You loved me before, but you didn’t get what you needed from me in our relationship,” I said. “Let’s sit down and talk about what you would need to feel secure in our relationship.”

“The story of a love is not important—what is important is that one is capable of love,” wrote the American actress Helen Hayes. “It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.”

———-

The older, analog life still holds deep-rooted benefits that cannot be trumped by technology. You never take a walk in nature for an hour and then exclaim, “I wish I had been checking Facebook.” You do, however, say the opposite after wasting countless hours online.

Why? Rather than making you feel better, stronger and more connected to your deeper values—which nature has been discovered in numerous studies to do—Facebook and other social media sites have been found to make us feel depressed.

Similarly, you never spend a few hours hanging out with a friend and then think, “I wish I had been checking email.” Yet you often think the opposite after a multi-hour descent from Email Mountain.

What do you feel you are missing out on when you spend a lot of time online? What can you do about it?

If you have enjoyed this article, you can receive similar articles by
Dr. Anthony Silard in your email inbox. Every two weeks, we send the latest issue of The Art of Living Free Newsletter to over 300,000 people in our global community. Please join us!