“Soulmates aren’t the ones who make you happiest, no. They’re instead the ones who make you feel the most. Burning edges and scars and stars. Old pains and pangs, captivation and beauty. Strain and shadows and worry and yearning. Sweetness and madness and dreamlike surrender. They hurl you into the abyss. They taste like hope.” ~ Victoria Erickson

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I think we all have a romanticized vision of love.

Growing up we are conditioned to crave love, as if it’s the very thing that will fill all the empty holes inside of us and make us feel happy and complete as long as we have a tight grasp on it.

We believe love will bring us bliss. We identify being in love with feelings of connection, safety and romance. We expect that when we have it, it will mean deep and soulful feelings of passion, long, delicious love-making sessions and that feeling of never being alone.

When we’re without it, many of us feel that there’s something missing. So we search for it. Because we believe that love feels good. And we want to feel good all the time.

But the truth is, love doesn’t always feel good. We know that. We’ve all experienced that at some point in our lives. And the fact that it doesn’t feel good is where some of the greatest gifts of love lie.

Real love, or what I like to call a “soul-mate love” is meant to serve a purpose for our souls. That love is meant to push against us and make us a little uncomfortable. That love is meant to challenge us. It beckons for us to come closer when we want to run from it because we can sense this might not be the fairy tale ride we’ve been hoping for…and besides, running is our pattern.

It seduces us into becoming vulnerable and allowing another person to see us for who we truly are.

It reflects back to us our true reflection….the mirror image of ourselves, forcing us to see things about ourselves that we look away from every time we pass a mirror.

It shines a flashlight on our darkest, most hidden places…the shadow sides of us that need healing if we’d just bring them out into the light.

This kind of love is uncomfortable. It doesn’t always feel good. At least not in the moment. But there’s a path…a road that this kind of love takes us down, leading us to an extraordinary place we can come to rest and bask in the sunshine of bright love—the feel good kind.

Because when we’re pushed and challenged and rubbed up against by this kind of love, we become better. Like an athlete whose trainer pushes them daily outside their physical comfort zone, creating aches and pains and mind-boggling exhaustion in the moment. Ultimately, that athlete emerges stronger, better and more confident in themselves when they realize what they are truly capable of.

When we’re seduced by this kind of love, the adept and nurturing ones who open our hearts tentatively and slowly, gently guiding themselves into those soft places within us that need to be seen, we learn how to release the fear that we won’t be loved and accepted for exactly who we are.

The perceived flaws and “not enoughness” story we carry inside of us is brought to the surface by another person which feels so exposing and painful while it’s happening because we simply have never allowed it to be.

But once vulnerable, there is no going back to the way we used to be. Because we realize through the experience how much we’ve been missing out on by not allowing people to really see us and love us for who we truly are, instead of who we’ve pretended to be.

When the mirror is held up to us by this kind of love, we often cringe and turn away.

“That’s not me,” we cry out! Sometimes we go so far as to hurl insults and accusations at the mirror, accusing it of everything we ourselves see reflected back, indignant that this person would dare to hold that mirror up to us.

Until we realize that what we’re seeing in that mirror is not them but us. The things we say we don’t like, the complaints we have about how they make us feel. The belief that they aren’t giving something to us that we need in the relationship…it all reveals the things we actually see in ourselves.

What are we not giving to ourselves? Where aren’t we showing up for us?

So the love reflects back to us what needs to be seen. And we can finally start giving ourselves what we need instead of searching for it and demanding it from another person.

And lastly when our lover brings their flashlight out and shines it brightly into our dark places, the ones we’d hope they’d never find, the places we, ourselves insist “must stay hidden because they are too dark to bear,” we are forced to heal those things.

They are meant to come out of their hiding place so that we can be proven wrong. Those things will not stop someone from loving us. They are often the very things that another person has brought into our lives to heal and help us let go.

So yes…love doesn’t always feel good. I know. I’ve been there. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Those loves that didn’t feel good in the beginning or somewhere in the middle or at the very end—they grew me. They created expansion. They were the catalyst to me stepping into who I really am in this world.

They brought me out of hiding. They taught me about compassion and forgiveness. They made it okay for me to not be perfect.

Did all of it feel good? Like the romanticized, fairy tale love I grew up as a little girl believing in?

No, I can’t say it did.

But those loves…they proved to me that it’s still worth opening my heart to love again. And I’m still here, which means my soul still has some growing left to do.

 

Author: Dina Strada

Image: Jenavieve/Flickr

Editor: Catherine Monkman