If you love something

In keeping with my recent tendency to examine trite phrases that seem to end up in motivational conversations, I've spent some time thinking about another classic.

If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it was yours. If it doesn't, it never was.

(Okay, so I paraphrased. And inserted things like commas and periods. Google that phrase, and you'll find that it just can't seem to help but come across like it was written by a semi-literate teenage girl.)

Setting something that you love free is incredibly hard. It means letting go. It means understanding that they have their own life to live. Their own choices to make. Their own path to take. Their own challenges. You may be asking too much of them. They may love you, but they just can't be what you want or need them to be. Whatever the case may be, you accept that it's outside of your power to do anything more to change it. In fact, by trying too hard to keep that love in your life, you could suffocate it. In the immortal words of .38 Special, "if you cling too tightly, you're gonna lose control".

If it comes back to you, it doesn't necessarily mean that it was always yours, or that it will stay in your life from that point on. My joy came back to me after 16 years of darkness and loneliness for both of us. And now it's gone. I've found the hard way that things don't happen according to our wishes in life based on the desire that we throw at them. If this were true, we all would have gotten the puppy we wanted for Christmas when we were kids. I've also learned that life isn't anything remotely like a romantic comedy, or a sitcom from the 80's. Telling someone that if they really, really loved you, that they would find a way to be with you doesn't result in a montage of two people crying alone and then inevitably finding their way to each other at the hour of their greatest need. It breaks things.

I am in love, for better or worse, and will be for the rest of my life. At this point, I don't know if I will ever have her in my life again, but I have to let it go. If this love was meant to be, it will. If not, I'm left with memories of the happiest moments in my life, outside of the birth of my children. I was lucky enough to have reached out to the most wonderful woman that I have ever known, to have given her all of the man that I am, and to have been the recipient of her love, for however brief a time. How many people can claim to have been so fortunate? If I should never hear from her again, I was still lucky enough to have had her in my life. Even in this, of all things, I find that I am an incredibly lucky man.