Uncensored

Part 11

"What is the difference between the love of your life, and your soulmate?
One is a choice, and one is not."

There is love that takes time to build, time to be found, time to grow, and a lifetime to be kept alive. The love I found with my husband is the kind of love that happens over time, that grows, that is painful, and that becomes better and stronger over time.
And then there is the kind of love that ignites so suddenly and powerfully- it's surprising to all involved- maybe love at first sight, maybe fate, may you call it whatever you want. Or maybe it was just a love that was never gone.

There are cultures that believe in rebirth and reincarnation, so they would say two lovers may have met before in a previous life, and they may have loved each other before or they were meant to be. But with her it was different. It was not love at first sight, but when it happened the second time around, I fell instantly and I fell hard, because the love that had once been there had never really left, it was still there, lying dormant, almost forgotten, ignored, and pushed away; but it had been there all along.

My husband was the love of my life, the person I slept next to, the person I chose to spend my life with, the person I moved across the country with four times, the person I bought a house with, the person I shared a pet, holidays, meals, birthdays, and chores with, and the person I wanted to have children with. But he was never my soulmate. When I was young, I fell in love with the word soulmate. I fell in love with the implications of destiny and rarity, with the implication of unconditional love and fate. Years later, I was pretty sure that soulmates were an invention of poets, movie writers, hopeless romantics, and unmarried, single people, some illusion for naïve teenagers to believe in. Marriage, and years and years of relationship, teach you one or two things about reality, none of which have anything to do with the idea of soulmates. The diplomat I am, I wouldn't' straight out say that soulmates don't exist, I just didn't believe in them anymore, until I didn't even know anymore what that word was supposed to mean.

But there was something missing in my life; on some levels it was obvious (with my eating disorder and depression being symptoms of that) and on others more covert; but in any case, something was not right. And something inside of me must have known better than my head what it needed when it, out of nowhere, reached out to her again. Reached out after eight years had passed. Reached out to say "Hi." As if that's even possible, just saying Hi.

It was scary how familiar she felt- everything about her: her words, her soul, talking to her. I realized soon that I was playing with fire. I was a married woman talking to her ex-girlfriend, talking a lot, talking intimately, and starting to feel too much when doing so. But nothing in me ever considered stopping. It felt too good and too right to stop. She later asked me about the moment I realized I was falling for her (again) and I couldn't really tell. All I knew was that she became my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night. One of the signs though was the guilt- about all the time I spent with her, guilt about hiding my phone, hiding my face, and all the thoughts that crept into my mind. That's when I knew I had entered a slippery slope. I knew I would cheat before I was even cheating. Can you cheat with somebody without ever seeing them face-to-face, without being in the same room, without touching, without being on same continent?
The answer is: you can, if your heart choses to do so.

Can you love two people at the same time?
Plenty of people would argue that you cannot, at least to love equally much. But I would ask those people: how do you quantify love into something that can be measured and thus compared? Being monogamous, as seems to be the social standard in most societies, also means that if there is ever more than one person, you have to choose. There seems to be a human tendency to compare- who do you love more?

I loved them differently. Lovers tend to expect to be put first, put above everything else, have the highest place (of priority) in somebody's heart and life. Marriage made that choice for me. That commitment puts everything else behind it. There is a quiet understanding between my husband and I that we come first. For us, there has always been the agreement that we will not leave each other, and I have never doubted that we won't have a reason to reconsider. But I didn't understand why somebody would willingly place themselves second to that. It was true that she felt more like home than anything else in my life. But I still wouldn't leave the other home I had built, even for my soulmate. And I didn't know of that was stupid, selfish, destructive, or self-destructive. If I ever considered leaving, I would have to ask myself if it would be worth it first. But there were only a handful of reasons that could ever make it worth it, and I don't mean being with her being worth breaking the promise, but make worth the pain and anguish of a broken promise and me having to be able to live with that. There was no doubt that my leaving him would kill him, so how could I ?

But to me, that didn't mean I loved her any less. If anything, I must have loved her more- why else would I have continued jeopardizing my marriage, everything, why else would we have chosen the pain?

There are the people who cheat- and I never thought I would be one of them.
And there are the people who fall in love with cheaters.
Ironically, none of this mattered to us. We loved each other despite everything that was wrong about it, and the more difficult it became, the more stubbornly and fiercely we loved.
Neither of us gave themselves a choice. Because you may choose the love of your life, who you spend your life with, who you wake up to, and who you go to bed with, but you cannot chose your soulmate.

"Soulmates aren't the ones who make you happiest.
They're instead the ones who make you feel the most.
Burning edges and scares 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.
The taste like hope."