Deeply Virtuous People Scare Me

While on my lunch break at work the other day, an article in one of our many magazines caught my eye. I had just finished a fascinating piece on Stonehenge in the National Geographic and was looking for something a little lighter to chew on. So I picked up one of the more woman geared ‘zines and began to flip idly through it, while absently sucking down mass amounts of water and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The article that snared my attention was one of a series on love. Love always catches my eye because, well for one, I am a GIRL and two, because I think the topic is such a timeless one; still surprising, full of pitfalls and naked with emotion. In this particular article, the woman writing was discussing her honest and tumultuous journey to “true love”.

The reason this woman stood out to me was not only the similarity of thought processes I seemed to share with her, but the unabashedly forthright tone she used to tell her story. In a way, the article was not just about her personal love story; it was advice to those of us making our own way through the humbling, sometimes heartbreaking and often terrifying journey of love. She’d found her perfect man on the third marriage (third times a charm, no?) and had learned enough along the way to know this was the one. In her own words,

“…Deeply, Determined Virtuous people scare me. As it turns out, I prefer the full boil to the long simmer and I wish I’d known it sooner.”

I couldn’t agree more.

One particular paragraph was so quotable to me, I immediately rushed to copy it down.

She said,

“Know Yourselves.

Be real and unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what he’s made of and vice versa. We are both people who want cutmen and foxhole buddies; we see life as wonderful and difficult and requiring energy and stamina and, occasionally, guile. We don’t mind any of that. We are both bossy and demanding and largely unrepentant. We don’t mind any of that. We yell. We apologize profusely. We are idiosyncratic in our tastes, and we are both quite confident that our taste is better than most people’s (including each other’s). We take sex and family and food seriously and organized religion not at all. We are hard to embarrass and we cry like babies. We are each what the other hoped for.”

Couldn’t possibly have said it better myself. My heart thrilled to this. Every single word rings true for me. This is what I, and perhaps many people, truly want out of a relationship. A place where your faults and your triumphs are met intensely by your lover, where the battleground is Life and your Love is there, staunchly by your side to fight the battle with you, not against you.

If you’d asked me a little over a year ago, “Could you ever love again?”- I would’ve said no. And it would’ve been an emphatic no, knowing full well every single cliché out there about broken hearts and the dramatics thereof. But this time it was my heart that was broken, my unending pain and I couldn’t see even a glimmer of light at the end of the long, lonely tunnel.

I had something that, on the surface, seemed very much like the above quoted paragraph. Underneath the moments of bliss, it was a horrid situation where two people were trying desperately to force a square peg into a round hole. We both wanted a foxhole buddy but I think it ended up being like two professional boxers wound up and stuck in the same ring. Although I would have to say I was boxing far outside of my weight class, in this particular case.

Finally making the decision to leave rocked my entire world. I’d been in my fair share of relationships and learned many things about myself along the way. Nothing quite like this, though. I was in unfamiliar territory, leaving someone I still cared for. Maybe, as a friend said to me once, that had more to do with me than the actual relationship. For the first time, I’d let down my walls. I consciously did this, at his request, and opened up completely and warmly to Trust – a foreign concept for me. Although this went largely unrewarded in the end, it was an amazing feeling to invest so willingly and unreservedly into someone without a single thought of the return. I was without guile, without selfishness. Not necessarily my M.O.

So, what did I learn from all this? I have a giant capacity for love. I have a warm, generous heart and the ability for great sacrifice. I do love children (it was questionable for awhile with me) and I am never going to hide who I am again. I learned that being feisty is more than okay, to look out for “numero uno” and to never, ever let myself become completely dependent on another human being.

I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and just knowing it is there lifts my heart and mind to higher hills. So, if you ask me now, “Could you ever love again?”, I would have to say, I certainly hope so. I just know what I’m looking for now. I’m looking for my foxhole buddy, my cutman, who believes that sex, family and food should be taken seriously, and the rest of Life should be taken with a grain of salt.