Mercedes Déziel-Hupé, Bright Star Woman

I haven’t been in many long-term relationships. So I’m often curious about how successful couples manage to not only “make it work” but how they love and like each other after years of life’s waves crashing at their shores.

They fall in love with each other over and over. They choose to be together. They grow together. They love each other a day at a time. Who doesn’t want a love with lasting power? We may love the butterflies, but once it’s over, we want something to keep our hearts warm through the every day, with some romance here and there. It’s said that a huge part of the human experience is to share it with another.

How DO the long-lasting happy couples do it?

Love

It seems that the secret isn’t a secret at all. It’s in understanding the word… and I’m a trained linguistic, so here goes.

Love is a verb.

The Merriam-Webster defines a verb as:

grammar : a word (such as jump, think, happen, or exist ) that is usually one of the main parts of a sentence and that expresses an action, an occurrence, or a state of being

Because relationships involve at least two people (and that’s enough for me personally), the relationship is alive. Because relationships are alive, they evolve, grow and change. A relationship is an organism, a being and beings imply actions as much as states. In fact, states are often fleeting moments in between actions.

Love is an exchange, which you can see in friendships, in parent-child relationships, in romance. The exchange is an action, or rather a series of actions. Love, is inevitably, a series of actions made from a place of awareness and intention.

Love, whether romantic or otherwise, is absolutely an aspect of an intentional life.

Loving Relationships

Every day is a chance to start fresh. I often forget that I am powerful and that with each sunrise, I am renewed in my creative ability. There’s no way to know the future and all we have is now. So why not make the choice to love?

I’ve been in my relationship for over four years now and it’s the longest and most honest one I’ve been in. I’m free to be me and I learn how to love even the less likeable traits of another human being. It’s a challenge, and some days, as he puts it “we don’t like each other’s behaviour very much” but “we are committed and we love each other”. What he means is “I chose to be here and I choose it again.” It’s rewarding and I’m still standing by his side. There are certainly factors that influence my choice and I try to keep three things in mind when making my choice.

The 3 things that affect our choice to love: Presence, Change and Free Will

Presence: It’s important to keep in mind that we’re in a relationship with the person in front of us today. We can talk about yesterday and tomorrow, but do we love who’s in front of us right now? Can we connect? Is the overall picture still of a healthy, fulfilling relationship? Is this person (and am I) acting out of love and if not, is that something I can help with? We need to bring awareness back to each other, to right now. What can we DO now to show this person we love them? Because the present is a gift, we must think in terms of gratitude and grateful people offer thanks. Why not an act of love?
Change: The one constant in life is change. Living beings also grow and evolve. Actively rediscovering each other as we grow is a crucial part of the process of love. As people, we step forward, we fall back, we leap, we soar, we crash. Our process is messy. There are internal factors and then, there are external factors. Our interests vary, we learn new things, we integrate new lessons. We make new friends, we get new jobs. We undergo a plethora of temptations (from too much sugar to a spending free to wondering what life would be single). Sharing these experiences with your partner and making the relationship a spiritual practice of communication and participation will help grow together.
Free Will: This part is implied in change. We’re in relationships with at least another person. The notion of “one” might be romantic, but it’s not practically true. We’re two parts of a greater whole, but those parts are people, with minds, hearts, souls and bodies over which only THEY have dominion. This is super hard to swallow for any Type A or codependent person (ahem, I know first-hand), but you CAN’T control the other person. Nor should you want to. Learning the balance between respecting yourself in your values and allowing your loved one space to BE is incredibly difficult when it doesn’t suit you (it sounds terrible, but that’s the human truth!). Letting go of control means we’re vulnerable, but it’s the only way to love someone completely for who they are. Express your needs, be respectful and let go!

Essentially, to build (and rebuild) loving relationships, to withstand the waves, we need to adapt. Our relationship is never the same. We then move past habits and beliefs that have become ingrained and no longer serve us. We need to bring our awareness back to the present and focus on loving actions to take. That’s how we show and feel the love we share. To be loved, we must first choose to love. We give before we receive, but we also need to know how to receive. That, in itself, is a bit of a challenge. But love helps us rise to the occasion.

We need to push ourselves (and each other) gently into conjugating love for our relationship(s), or we become complacent. Love is a verb. Take action!

When I was thinking about the practice of breaking patterns, I thought of something that often happens when there’s a breakthrough; there’s a shift. Something that kept happening in a loop, perhaps “à la soupe du jour” but a soup nonetheless, suddenly has a different outcome.

Life lessons sometimes come back to check on you. They swing by to allow us to integrate the lesson from a different perspective. To show us that we’ve grown, we’ve learned or that we’ve rediscovered something about ourselves we thought we’d lost or had simply forgotten about.

A childhood lesson of mine visited to see how I’d handle “speaking up” situation.

I was working on a project and the person who was overseeing it made a decision impacting me that surprised me. And not the good kind. I felt punished, treated unfairly and didn’t understand why the event was happening to me or why this person had made the decision they made. I’d even wondered how I’d done them wrong and started taking their decision personally.

I came home ranting that day. My partner and my mom both expressed sympathy but they both, in their way, asked if I had a say in the decision that had been imposed upon me. I told them it’d been imposed on me and I thought I hadn’t had the “opportunity” to say anything, realistically.

Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I sat with this.

The following day, I brought my concerns to this person and shared my feelings of disappointment in their decision. I tried to negotiate. At first, it seemed my arguments were not going to provide resolution or change this person’s mind, but at least, I knew that I had spoken my peace. Later that day, this person returned to see me and told me that someone else* had raised the same concern I had, and since we were of the same mind, the person overseeing the project had decided the decision had a broader impact than what was originally considered. And the strangest thing happened: the person changed their mind (in my favour!).

I felt my faith in people being restored. I felt there was justice. I felt supported. Surely enough, I expressed my sincere gratitude to both persons (the supporter and the decision-maker).

When I came home, feeling victorious and fortunate, I happened to share this outcome with my mom, who reminded me of a lesson I learned in kindergarten.

True Colours…

As we all sat around in class learning our colours, we were being asked to name the colour to which the teacher was pointing. I was named in no particular order and out of surprise, I blurted out the wrong colour: “Brown!” (it was grey). My teacher immediately moved on to another student, although she’d given everyone else a second chance. I came home feeling defeated and down on myself. I was five and I was a failure! “Mom, I am stupid, I don’t know my colours!”

After some coaxing, my mom got the story out of me. I made a mistake and I didn’t get the same chance as everyone else. I experienced a small-time injustice. My mom proceeded to show me, through an exercise, that I did in fact know my colours (in English and French!). She restored part of my self-confidence. She calmed me down and asked me how I thought I could resolve this with my teacher. We concluded that I needed to explain how what happened made me feel. I was so scared!

The next day, I went to school and I asked my teacher if I could speak with her at recess (picture a tiny 5-year old asking to speak with you with a solemn look on her face and a crimped side ponytail – that was often my look back then). I took deep breaths and I explained that I knew I’d made a mistake but I felt like I didn’t get the same chance everyone else did. She hadn’t realized what she did or that it had hurt my feelings. She was so surprised that I didn’t get it the first time – me being a model student – that she moved on. She didn’t even realize that she took a chance away from me by doing so. Her expectation of my usual abilities and my experience of the situation were worlds apart.

Let the sass roll off your back!

My teacher apologized for treating me differently and for hurting my feelings (which caused me to question my abilities). Fortunately, she wasn’t an ego-driven adult and she loved her teaching job. In other words, she was receptive. She told my mother she was impressed with my judgment, my communication and my courage. Who knew?

Years later, as a twenty-something adult, the childhood lesson paid me a visit because I’d had my abilities questioned and I’d been treated unfairly. Along the way though, I’d lost faith in finding people like my kindergarten teacher. I’d lost faith there was someone brave inside my shell who believed in speaking up. I’m happy life’s proven me wrong. There are people who listen and I am brave. So are you.

How have you shown courage?
Have you spoken your truth lately?

*I’m underlining here that the belief I now hold about support is taking shape. See my earlier post on Manifesting.

Author: Mercedes Déziel-Hupé (Page 10 of 18)

Love Is A Verb: Loving, Love, Loved

The 3 things that affect our choice to love: Presence, Change and Free Will

Childhood Lesson 2.0

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