I have been ruminating on marriage and commitment to a Beloved Other recently since I celebrated my 23rd anniversary with my sweetie, Peter. I know there are many opinions about marriage as an “institution”, and I’m not here to argue with anyone or convince anyone about marriage being a desired state to live in. I just want to talk about mine.
Growing up with my parents, I saw marriage at its best as unreliable and unstable, and at its worst, as a torture chamber. My mother and father eloped when they were quite young, and my mother had me when she was a mere 18 years of age. She went directly from her father’s house to her husband’s arms, and chose not to have time in her life to prove to herself that she could make it on her own. Neither my mother nor my father had the benefit of time and experience to grow and mature in themselves before commitment to one another; therefore, they had by default to do that with one another and with their children.
Their marriage was shaky from the beginning; they were quite infatuated with one another, so that held them together for some years. But their lack of emotionally maturity caused them to fight with one another; their alcoholism caused them to unconsciously play out mean games, my father the angry dominator, and my mother the crying victim. Their lack of boundaries emotionally and sexually drove them to have many sexual affairs by the time they divorced after 20 years of marriage. Their union did not feel holy to me, their concept and modeling of love did not feel divine. In fact, it felt like the opposite; the environment and climate that their marriage created felt unsafe, chaotic, frightening, even dangerous. I was relieved that they separated; I wondered why they hadn’t done it sooner.
As I came into the age of wanting to be with another, I was fortunate to be drawn to a young man in my senior year who was still innocent in his own love experience, as I was. We were able to be gentle and shy in our explorations of what love meant with one another. It was an ideal first love, I think. His respect and kindness with me were the complete opposite of the roaring rage of my predator father, who took what he wanted from my mother with a set of his massive jaw, and when she was not available, passed out from drunkenness, or hiding from him, he took it from me.
Later, after the blurry university years where I played out my internalized parental modeling in endless and repetitive fashion, I met my Beloved Peter while applying for a job as a server at a popular Atlanta restaurant. I was at the end of my rope, completely hopeless in the love relationship department, jaded and burned out. I had given up; interestingly, it was this surrender that opened the path for Peter and I to SEE one another.
We both tell the story similarly…we saw each other across the room, and there was a sense of recognition. A feeling of “Oh, THERE you are!” The feeling I had was of being drawn in to something much larger than myself. Sure, I could have walked away, but I was curious. This feeling was different than anything I’d experienced.
It didn’t take very long to understand that we were meant to be together. On our first date, we walked Piedmont Park together, sharing spiritual philosophies and favorite ice cream flavors. In the midst of my answering the latest round of “what’s your favorite___”, he said, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” I just kept talking…to his credit, he bravely said, “Didn’t you hear what I said? I think I’m falling in love with you!” This stopped me in my tracks; how could I ignore it now? This was my clue that this man, this relationship, this love was going to be different.
Oh, the pain of failed love relationships that I carried in my heart! The sad example of years of mutual hurting that my parents provided, along with my attempts to find love by compromising my body, mind and spirit, had created a defensive and jaded wall around my heart. This complete honesty from Peter, this innocence and confession of his heart, totally disarmed me. Both of us threw away the game playing that seems to prevalent in the dating scene, and spoke deep truths to one another. It was a great relief.
Some data was still buried deep in my knowing that his honesty awoke. Once the rusty door to my innermost center was sprung open by his simple offering to love me, an old song came faintly from inside; a clear stream came trickling through until it became a rumble and all but washed away the debris lodged there by my previous messy attempts to create relationship. Peter was the reminder and personification of my childhood concept of love. I remember skipping around the dining room table at age 4, pretending my love and best friend was playing with me. I saw him clearly; he had dark hair and eyes, and pale skin. He loved me utterly; I was the apple of his eye, and he would never knowingly hurt me. I could trust him completely; he was absolutely safe. I now saw him in Peter, as if I had known as a little girl that I would find him someday. Peter was a doorway to my most precious and innocent self, and that old knowing had been rushed to the surface by the purity of his love.
On an ego level, I fought this for awhile; my skepticism about love and marriage certainly caused me to insist that we live together for two years before we married, and my poor Beloved has had to endure all manner of tests that I unconsciously laid at his feet, opportunities to prove his chivalry and the true mettle of his deep feelings for me. Much to my great happiness and relief, he has always passed.
It’s not that we haven’t had our human problems, one of which was my angst very early in our relationship about surrendering my protective ego to the purifying flames of greater love. “Who will I be if I’m not Licia?” I would ask him with worried brow. I did not trust Peter’s utter loyalty to me for many years, and still I have attacks of outdated, dark concern that seem to emanate from my dustiest inner file cabinet, memories of the ways my parents hurt each other.
I feel that we agreed to come together at some level, perhaps the soul, for the purpose of healing one another. We have had some very hard times; there have been periods in our 23 years together that felt like slogging through deep mud, when the spark and inspiration of our original meeting was all that we could muster to remember why we were together. But we held on through those times, and it enabled us to grow in our mutual respect and knowing of the magic and integrity of our desire to love more deeply, to bring more of our Spirit to this earthly life.
I have come to see the love relationship, and certainly mine, as a Temple of Initiation, an alchemical cauldron in which we have the daily and moment to moment mirroring of our own self in the Beloved Other’s eyes. If we seek true growth, if we crave spiritual learning and submission to a Greater Teacher, what better Master than our love relationship? In the coming together of the two, a third is created; it is the classic Trinity, the union of the polarities, the positive and the negative, the yin and the yang, the Great Father and the Great Mother, or the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine. Call it what you will. Our mutual awareness of a Third Presence of Holiness created by our coming together, of a larger energy field created by our union has invited, inspired and invoked the best of each of us. In moments of awareness of this Holiness, neither of us wants to lie or be less than pure with one another because that would be desecrating the union.
The innocence of this ideal is something I can still feel today….the cockles of my heart know this innocence is real. It is the divine, pure quality of real love. It is high in vibration, it flies and dances on wings of rainbow colored light, it lifts and inspires, makes me closer to God/dess, yet causes me to weep in celebration of my earthly body which receives Him and holds Him in my arms. It is a recognition that my True Love, and yes, that I, are physical representations of the Creator, the Divine Masculine and Feminine, the two poles that unite as one to create the All That Is.
Some people do not believe that there is such a thing as true love, in which both partners come together for the purpose of healing, consciousness, and lifting one another up to their highest potential, but here at our celebration of 23 years together, I am blessed to know better.
Copyright Licia Berry, 2009
