What do you do in the meantime? Somewhere in the back of your mind you know the day will eventually come when the relationship you are in become all you want. Or all that you want in a relationship will one day show up. The question remains, however, what do you do in the meantime? There’s a funny thing about love. It will find you in the most unusual circumstances, at the most unlikely times. Love will come upon you, throw its arm around you, and transform your entire existence. Unfortunately, most of us won’t recognize the experience or understand the impact when it’s happening. It’s like being in therapy. You keep talking, searching, questioning what’s going on with you and in you while being totally ignorant of the fact that you are being blessed. Perhaps it’s because love rarely shows up in the places that we expect it to or looks the way we expect it to look.
When you are not happy where you are and you are not quite sure if you want to leave or how to leave, you are in the meantime. It’s a state of limbo. You are hanging on, ready to let go, afraid to fall, not wanting to hurt yourself, afraid you will hurt someone else. In the meantime, you pray the other person will let go first so that you will not feel guilty.
The other person keep dropping hints, letting you know it’s time to go. You deny it! Why? You don’t know why, but I can tell you that the meantime is fraught with don’t knows and can’t do’s. Don’t know why I can’t go. Don’t know why I should stay. Don’t know where I’m going. Don’t know how I am going to get there, wherever there is. Ambivalence, confusion, reluctance, and paralysis are all the characteristics of the meantime. If you knew the answers to these questions you would be just fine. In the meantime, you are many things, fine is probably not one of them!
Life would be much easier if, when we hit a snag in a relationship, any relationship, we would stop, address it, and move ahead smoothly. The truth is, in most cases, we could do just that. The reality is, we don’t do it! We keep moving. We allow little insults to become raging angers, little arguments to become festering fueds, little pains to become deep wounds, and we keep moving. In many cases, we keep hurting. When the relationship at issue is an intimate, loving one, the attempt to move forward without addressing the pain only complicates matters, further poisoning the relationship.
How can I stay and not get hurt? How can I go without hurting? You cannot answer these questions if you are in pain. What you can do is make the effort to to discover the truth about love, because it is the only thing that can help you move through the experience. In the meantime, if we can remain loving ourselves and toward other people by staying in conscious and honest communication, a disruption, a snag, or delay in a relationship becomes a healing process. When we cannot, we engage in meantime behavior- hurting, fighting, not telling the truth, and moving forward in confusion. Confusion begets confusion.
Life is all about love. Love is the only meaning of life.
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