Falling in Love and Falling Apart

Foundations of trust are built with bricks of honest presence.

My friend Hannah texted me yesterday that she felt like she was falling in love and falling apart at the same time. Yes, me too, I replied—how wild, that these things often go hand in hand. Grief and love sit next to each other. The highs come with the lows.

I have been falling in love—something I hadn’t given much thought to until it started happening. I have been consistently single from the time I have been old enough to date anyone—single, with periodic bursts of (usually very dramatic) flings that end with an abrupt and confusing flair. I’m good at being alone; I think I’m good at doing it all on my own, and can let myself be as moody and irritable as I want in the darkness of my own solitude.

But cold independence doesn’t yield the kinds of relationships I want in my life. The last few months, I have chosen to continue opening to the love in front of me; simultaneously, opening to the frozen parts inside, that haven’t seen the light of another person’s awareness in a very long time. I’m learning, in this relationship I’m watering, that I have to arrive as I truly am. What is planted is what grows. A foundation of trust is built with bricks of honest presence.

Falling in love (with anything, anyone) involves falling. It involves letting go, and losing, and coming undone in ways you didn’t necessarily plan for or want. What I’m learning from love is that you have to let yourself be seen, in all your messy, complex superficiality. Your shadows and insecurities will inevitably come forth, and you should probably learn how to stand the discomfort of someone else seeing them.

For me, falling in love has only come with the willingness to fall apart. And so, fall apart I must do.

. .

Ram Dass says something like falling in love with another person means you’re a vibrational match for the place inside each of you that is connected to love. I think this sounds something like truth. It’s a good reminder that love, the unconditional kind, is a kind of universal thread that weaves us all together. It holds us here.

Because we are all human, we have the capacity to feel the range of how devastatingly beautiful life is: the cavernous void of despair, the wide and bright expanse of joy, all the little bits in between. We ought not to deny ourselves any of it. When it comes, we feel it.

There will always be loss, pain, and suffering. There will always be something to grieve.

There will also always be love. May we choose to keep letting it in.

Maggie