Love Makes Your Soul Crawl Out From Its Hiding Place

It took someone exceptional to quell my fears about love and marriage. At forty-one, I was at that point in my life where all was right, and I was ready to share my life with the right person.

M arriage was never high on my to-do list of things that I wanted to accomplish in my lifetime. I was never one of those girls who fantasized about Prince Charming and the fairytale wedding with the beautiful white dress. My answer to that was always, whose fairytale is it anyway?

Maybe I was afraid of love and the surrender—I didn't want to become a non-person in my own skin by permanently attaching myself to someone who didn't appreciate my spirit. I didn't want to wake up in the morning with resentments piled high on my side of the bed like I'd seen in a lot of marriages while growing up. I wanted someone who knew the color of my soul, and so my rejection of marriage was to preserve that sacred part of myself.

Maybe I was a product of my environment. I'd grown up with my parent's cat and dog relationship. My parents divorced each other and then re-married each other. I used to think that I didn't want to lose myself to someone else because I saw my mother sacrificing herself and doing all the work in the relationship—she did everything financially, and she was the one trying to keep it together.

Although I admired her strength at keeping it together, I didn't want to have to work that hard to keep anything together. I found out the other day that my mother used to write and draw when she was in her teens. She had external ways of keeping and expressing her spirit. For me, that was a sad revelation, as I have never seen her write or draw anything in all of my years. How do you stifle that creative energy and not lose a part of yourself?

That is what I mean about losing myself. I used to see marriage as something that suffocated one's spirit because I had seen my mother work all her life—and work really hard at saving a one-sided relationship. She was mechanical about life, and she really didn't stop to nurture herself. She didn't have any interests outside of work and home, and I have always wondered how much of herself she'd sacrificed in the marriage.

It took someone exceptional to quell my fears about love and marriage. At forty-one, I was at that point in my life where all was right, and I was ready to share my life with the right person. We were both at the same point in our lives. A lot of people are in relationships where one has to play catch up, and they will never be at the same point with the same visions. In our marriage, my spirit is allowed to soar and not take a backseat the way my mother's had and he has promised not to steal my wind.

My views on marriage have changed drastically, and I am not at all surprised because we are allowed to reasses our fears as we grow. I realized that my mother's experience through my eyes did not have to be my own. My parents’ struggles in their marriage do not have to be ours. Love and marriage are learning experiences where together you find your rhythm. My parents eventually found their rhythm. Laurence and I have begun to find our rhythm. It begins with respect for each other's individual spirit and it is in the laughter we share. I have never laughed so much in my life. Maybe it is as Zora Neale Hurston says: "Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place."

Copyright@2005 Dawn G. Prince | Copyright@2006 Sure Woman.com

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