March 10, 2024

Late last year, I started sorting through things I’ve moved multiple times these past ten years.Most of these things, I needed to let go because I was hanging on to them as a way to hang on to the past rather than a desire to actually live with them. One of the things I surrendered to a dear friend was my yard chandelier. I rescued it from the the neighbor’s bin and hung it in our apple tree. I loved it. I loved sitting on our back porch and watching the light glint through the tree into the prisms. It was the crown jewel of the lovely house I shared with my ex girlfriend. Letting go of the yard chandelier felt like letting go of her. Not that I want to reunite and live happily ever after with her. I have no regrets about leaving her but rather my memories are awash in nostalgia. And sometimes nostalgia can hold us in an unhealthy grip.

Early last week I had breakfast with a platonic man friend and as we caught up we each shared our intense work over the past two years healing anxious attachment. He was fascinated at the work my partner and I had done over the last six months and how I learned how textbook the two of us were, he being avoidant and me anxious we were locked in a dysfunctional waltz. And the waltz was breaking us apart. My friend had been married a second time briefly and pointed to her avoidant attachment to the ultimate cause of their divorce. His story was heartbreaking and I could see the regret in his eyes as I recounted the work I had been doing with my partner and the often impossible feelings of holding space and being patient with my partner’s own process and growth.

“Oh god, I’ve wondered about this did I quit too soon”

I demurred this idea after he described her behavior, reducing him to roommate and moving into her own bedroom and ultimately her own life after they married.

I reached across the table and took his hand in mine.
“You were in a marriage of one. Don’t let your nostalgia for what could have been blur the reality of what was.”

And then I had an epiphany what if nostalgia or this over arching need of the anxiously attached to grasp and cling to the past is a way we anxious types self-soothe and allows us to tell a story that things weren’t that bad or we weren’t terrible people. We create security through our memories. Our lost person or persons become perfect without flaw or foibles or damage. The “failed” relationship then rests squarely on our shoulders. If only we had been this or that or more or less.

On my way home from breakfast, it occurred to me, I hold a secret shame—why wasn’t a sexless relationship—hat was pretty good in every other way—enough? We were great friends. But not lovers? Over the last ten years, I’ve owned and live the truth that sex is important to me. It’s as important to me as having a voice in. A relationship (husband #2 enters the process). It’s as important as loving myself enough to leave an abusive alcoholic (husband #2 enters the process) So why is carnal desire any less than my physical safety and emotional autonomy? Why is wanting to celebrate love and friendship through sexual expression less than those things?

When I turned down our gravel road, the sky endless above me and the grass an eternity around me, I contemplated the freedom I felt when I left that a relationship that wasn’t physically satisfying and thus didn’t nurture me at a soul level. It was one thing to let go of the chandelier but maybe it was time to give myself a gift of grace and decided the best gift I could give myself this next dance around the sun was taking myself off the cross and stop using nostalgia as an excuse to crucify myself.