RELATIONSHIPS: THE SETTLED WAY

“BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST THAN NEVER TO HAVE LOVED AT ALL”
Literary quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson

The miracle of love written about in religious writings, expostulated romantically by literary giants, sung about in love songs, written about in romance novels, acted out in movies and found on so many other platforms of this expression of human need is what keeps the world turning and tips it on its axis quite often.
I have a favourite radio station I enjoy listening to whilst driving around and on this day I heard the same song at least three times on this station. This particular song sung by a young man was expressing his total inability to move on since his girl had left him. She on the other hand appeared to have no problem getting to “move on”.
Has that ever happened to you?
Has the pain of romantic love lost been so incapacitating that it has felt as though you are a robot enacting life’s daily routine so as not to alert family and friends to the shattered person inside? Your instinct for survival keeps you going?
YOU ARE NOT ALONE… and centuries of writings on love have proved this. Yes! We have read or heard or witnessed this in many ways in the various responses to this human loss or rejection by a loved one. Suicide. Murders. Downfalls.
I’m going to let you in on a secret.
An accidental secret (if there is such a thing).
A secret about the pain of love lost and how it sometimes to leads to:
“THE SETTLED WAY”
My older sister who lives in the same city as I do was clearing out her son’s boxes of books and other paraphernalia from his youth which he had asked that she keep for him in storage at her house since he had moved out and on to Europe. She was now downsizing and did not have enough space in her new home to accommodate these boxes which he had packed up when home on one of his visits and asked to be kept in storage with her.
So she called him up and asked what she should do with the boxes. His response to “what should I do with your sealed boxes” was “Throw them out! Dump them!”
A mother is a mother … and this was a concerned mother for a young man, who as a child was regularly being marched to the lost and found room at school, and thinking along the lines of “he might have forgotten what’s in the boxes some of which might be important” my sister decided to open and check before just dumping.
Yes, general keepsakes like a rugby jersey signed by all the classmates in his final year at school; cricket pads all signed by friends in his teams; love letters from primary school crushes (too cute); valentine cards from uni and other memorabilia such which he felt could be dumped.
But … my sister paged and leafed through every article and item in the boxes and lo and behold up pops a diary. Not a day-by-day diary but a diary started five months into a particular year and then leading back to the first month of the same year. No not primary school or high school or even uni years but the months leading up to his decision to accept an overseas offer of employment at the age of 33.
My sister dithered … should she read it or just dump it?
The battle between respect for privacy and curiosity?
But … and believe me this is so … there is nothing to challenge a mother’s concerned curiosity and of course the reasoning behind such. Her reasoning? I might as well read it because whoever picks it up out there where it’s being dumped will read it. I might as well check no personal information is given away.
So, she read the diary.
What a reading! A heart-breaking outpouring of pain for a love lost!
My sister’s son’s description of his feelings at the time of his break-up with a girl he had been dating and had fallen deeply in love with are covered in just one word … Incapacitated? Totally! He records not being able to eat, to sleep, to function optimally at work and the heavy partying he indulged in and surprisingly a confession that his libido had turned into wood. Then a friend from uni - those friends who become like another brother - who had been working overseas came to SA to visit and encouraged him to apply overseas. Being a qualified CA, he soon got an overseas offer and some years later down the line he met and married a lovely girl and is now the proud father of two children. This helped my sister to understand why his relationships after this girl never lasted and why he took so long to marry.
He eventually SETTLED, took him ten years but he settled.
This settled is different from settling down where you sit still or you stop moving from place to place, or relationship to relationship or job to job. This settled means an acceptance of the fact that the person you gave your heart to, the person you really, really wanted to be in your life forever walked away and left you broken.
This settled means that you find a new person in your life who has awoken in your heart a renewal of the ability to love again: maybe never as you loved the first time, but to love nonetheless or else to grow to love and to appreciate that sense of belonging and well-being we all crave in a relationship. Perhaps the experience of the “fire and brimstone” version of love makes us more appreciative of the Settled Way. Very few people intentionally want to grow old alone. Taking the settled way is a tough decision but believe you me …

GROWING OLD ALONE IS A PAINFULLY DEPRESSING EXISTENCE.

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