The Expansiveness of Love

There are so many forms of love. I was talking with my husband, Brian, this morning about hugs. He said, "I'm giving you love hug. I want you to know how much I love you." It was still barely light out and only 6:15 in the morning and at that hour I couldn't suss out how a love hug was different than other hugs and so I asked, "If this is a love hug, what other kinds of hugs are there?"

We proceeded to list the different types of hugs there are in the world. Sad hugs, comforting hugs, friendship hugs, awkward hugs, excited hugs. Just hours after that conversation, I found myself hugging my ex-husband, Steve. He is pursuing a career change that suits him beautifully and I was so delighted he'd discovered this for himself. I gave him a heartfelt, encouraging, excited hug. I love Steve. Sort of uncontrollably. And by that I mean that I have wished I could un-love him, just a little.

My heart has broken over and over again around him, and I am learning, slowly it feels, to love him unconditionally, rather than uncontrollably. To love him regardless of how he feels about me, because, in the end, I love him. Regardless of how he feels about me. And how does he feel about me? I'm not sure and our used-to-be-best-friends-now-amenable-ex-spouses-moving-gingerly-towards-friends-again relationship doesn't quite have space yet for me to ask him. Or perhaps my heart doesn't quite have space yet to hear the answer.

Nonetheless, I think about him finding his true love (he mentioned in passing that he wanted to find that, along with a good book, a dog and a place to live) but the true love part stuck and I wonder how I will feel when he tells me he's found someone. A for-real someone. I know I will be happy. I'll be delighted and deeply grateful that he's found someone. I think I may also be a little sad. Not for him, of course, but for me. For, as Brian put it (because we talk about these things) a little door will close. A door, not even a realistic one, of possibility and of knowing. It will no longer be possible (whether I want it or not) for me to be the one who knows all off the pieces of Steve the best. And he has some incredible, beautiful pieces to know. It broke my heart a little, in the early waxing light of a rainy morning, to realize that I will not be that person for very much longer. In fact, I am not any longer that person, and haven't been for years now. Sometimes it takes the heart a while to catch up.

Steve, then, in that same line of thinking, will no longer be the one who knows me the best. Someone else is learning how to do that and it is wonderful and beautiful and breathtaking. It is also a little sad. And so comes another form of love for me and Steve. That of the people who used to know each other best, of best friends and barely-holding-on-to-any-type-of-relationship ex-spouses. My hope is that there are so many forms of love that he and I will find a new one that fits us as we are now. Where his eyes can shine and crinkle at the edges when I tell him I've met someone (as they did, blessedly, this morning). And when my eyes can do the same when he tells me he's found his true love.

We used to watch The Princess Bride together (he looks quite a bit like Wesley, though I, sadly, look nothing like the divine Princess Buttercup) and we knew they were us and we were them. Then there was a long period where that movie only made me cry for all that was lost. For all I thought I would never recover. For all I came to believe didn't exist. But now, it seems to me, that perhaps there is more than one form of true love. If ever I have loved someone irrationally, irrevocably, it would be Steve. And yet, and yet. He isn't currently in my life as anything more than a very delicately balanced, nurtured and fussed over newly forming friendship based on old love. But that love I have for Steve hasn't died or diminished. It's just as it always was. I worked at keeping that love for Steve, because I knew it was mine to give, no his to accept or reject. And while it has hurt over the last few years, sometimes, to give that love and know he did not want it, or couldn't receive it, I kept on giving it. And now, here we are, friends at last. I think that counts as true love as much as any fairy tale version.

I also know I am finding a different kind of love with Brian. It is a wiser, calmer, less-full-of-oursevles-and-more-full-of-our-hearts love. It exists for all the love that came before it. It too is irrevocable. It too is irrational in how much it asks me to opens my heart, even when I'm scared, even when the fear and worry start to push out the light. I remind myself that I've promised myself to keep my heart open to him and that turns this love positively incandescent. I'm not sure I would recognize what I have with Brian, had I not lost what I had with Steve, and so I find myself heartbroken, heartopen, grateful more than words can say, to both of them.

What I know is that love doesn't need anything but the space and time and the nourishment to grow. It does not need to be accepted or returned. It is ours alone to give and to give grandly. For the more of it we give, the more abundant our resources of it become. It is self generating.

So one true love for a lifetime? I don't think love wants to be contained like that.

And then I think: If love wants to be incandescent, brilliant, everywhere, if it wants to be lived and breathed and pushed into all the stuck dark corners of our minds and hearts and lives; I think then, too, it would have everyone be our true love. And that makes me wonder the (possible) impossible. What if I walked through my days treating everyone as if they are a true love of mine? What could my world look like, feel like, be like then?

I think it would likely be miraculous.