Turning Point

[ehowton]

Allowing time to heal; grieve, after a traumatic event is paramount in the process, as is experiencing, learning, growing, and thriving on one’s own to truly ground self prior to seeking external influences and new companionship. I wanted to give my wife’s BFF two full years to heal, and blossom into her magnificence on her own before I interfered. As these things sometimes happen, I was incapable of doing so, and have instead managed to paint myself into an unimaginable corner filled with (what am now learning is the destructive collateral damage of) unrequited love. I thought I would be able to endure it. I was wrong.

When I open myself up fully to my wife, every last bit of love, pride, accomplishment, lust, wanton desire, need, fun, comfort, and companionship is reflected and amplified back upon me; an ideal symbiotic relationship built upon the kind of unspoken trust forged over and over through sharing joys and fears, embarrassments and experiences, and carnal knowledge with one another while striving to become a better human along the way in hopes you can please them even a fraction of the pleasure you receive. It’s an exceedingly active, powerful, and perhaps most importantly, purposeful action. Unrequited love while active is powerful, but absent of the purposeful reciprocity required to sustain it, and is quite different in that the direction in which that energy flows is unequal to the rate of reflected return. I thought I had enough within me to burn endlessly without affecting those with whom I've chosen to share myself. I did not.

People are not interchangeable. Relationships are not interchangeable. Wife’s BFF is as singularly unique as my wife, but in completely different ways which I find equally as alluring and intoxicating, and no matter how long I live, I will never be able to replace either of them in my life, nor the impact of the painful, aching void they would invariably leave upon my heart were those relationships to ever end. But intimate relationships absolutely require not only the aforementioned reciprocity, but also transparency, vulnerability, and dialogue to be properly maintained, lest they die upon the very vine on which they were conceived. Intimate relationships can survive short term without all four with varying degrees of success, but each passing day has the potential to stretch thinner and thinner until what remains of that bond is either tended to, or destroyed completely. My imagined relationship with the BFF was conceived in my head, and in my head so shall it also perish.

I am struggling with how best to accomplish this seemingly insurmountable feat, grieving along the way for a loss that never existed to begin with.