Everything I Have to Tell You About Love, Episode 105
We human beings change all the time - it's inevitable. But somehow we've got into demanding that our friends, family and partners are fixed - that they 'complete us'. What would happen if we started to live with the truth of our ever-changing natures?
At the start of the 3rd year of Turning Towards Life, a conversation about walking a path together and being in nourishing relationship, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here’s Episode 105 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify.
It's the start of the third year of this project, and in this conversation we return together to the topic of human relationship. Our big mistake, Justin says, is our insistence on treating ourselves as objects. When we do this, we are left with little room but to demand that we be a certain way, and the ones we love be a certain way - a way that we will inevitably fall short of. And, as Lizzie says, that's the source of much unnecessary suffering, because humans change all the time. When we start to see that our demands that those we love 'complete us' are impossible to fulfil, we can start to love as a way of accompanying one another on an unknown path rather than a way to get to a final destination.
You can also download the mp3 audio file here.
This is everything I have to tell you about love
This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I've learned about marriage: nothing.
Only that the world out there is complicated,
and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,
and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,
is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,
and not to be alone.
It's not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it's what they mean.
Somebody's got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn't want to rescue you
or send for the army to rescue them.
It's not two broken halves becoming one.
It's the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home
because home is wherever you are both together.
So this is everything I have to tell you about love and marriage: nothing,
like a book without pages or a forest without trees.
Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.
Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.
Because nobody else's love, nobody else's marriage, is like yours,
and it's a road you can only learn by walking it,
a dance you cannot be taught,
a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.
And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,
not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.
And your hands will meet,
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.
And that's all I know about love.
– Neil Gaiman
Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash