Become A Legendary Lover
By Margaret Shrum
My parents were madly in love, so much that my father designed a house and filled it with gorgeous furniture that accommodated my mother’s petite 4’10 stature. He made sure that she could reach every shelf, her feet touched the ground on every chair she sat in and he created a home that was cozy and special for her. At the end of her life, he was with her in her last moments, I’m sure she felt loved even at her last breath, he was there at her side. Being a romantic, I’ve always dreamed of experiencing my own legendary love. I imagined from a young age, that I would conjure romance, a fantasy lover who swept me off my feet and treasured me with constant adoration. And I did!
At 45, I discovered that my legendary lover was ME! Love…It all begins inside of us. I’ve been married and Divorced…twice. I have loved big and been loved back. So over the past year, I decided to research love and what it meant in my life. What I discovered after dating over 72 men in 12 months in 2012, was what I already knew, that this was all an inside job. The men I dated were lovely and loving, but I didn’t need them to validate me, I realized that how I felt about myself was where the true love appeared. We’ve all heard the saying “we need to love ourselves first before we can love anyone else”. Not only true, but we need to love all parts of ourselves- the dark and light sides to our personality. In fact our darkest parts are often what makes us most beautiful, once we accept and celebrate those parts. Sharing those dark and light parts with others, both friends and potential partners, helps us grow and realize that true intimacy and love comes from being vulnerable through acceptance.
A friend sent me this interesting video, taken from the Tom Robbins book “Still Life With a Woodpecker”.
Please take a moment to watch it. The question of “who knows how to make love stay” comes up for a princess throughout out the book. Now that is a great question. “Who knows how to make love stay?” and here is my answer:
The greatest love we can have is the love affair we have with ourselves. Only then can we share our love fully with others. Love not “staying” is an illusion based on fear, love lives inside us all and is boundless. We can choose to love without expectation and free ourselves from disappointment. I believe that if you truly love someone, love never leaves. Even if the person physically moves onto another space, the love is always tucked away inside our souls and our subconscious minds. Love is not just a state of mind, it is life, the force that drives us, it fuels our passion and is behind all that we do. Love can’t be defined by words. We instinctively love our families, friends, lovers, fellow human beings, animals, the earth, beauty, creativity and beyond. That is our sole purpose, to love and be loved in this lifetime and the next…
Who is your Legendary Love? I invite you to explore how you can be your own legendary lover and of course celebrate and appreciate all of the beautiful loves you have had in your lifetime!
I appreciate your insightful responses and agree about knowing oneself and that relationships do require some sacrifices by both partners. How fortunate you and your wife were to share 21 years of growing up and acceptance of each other. Thanks for being a random guy who enjoys reading lingerie blogs and for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Interesting thoughts. I shared my life with my wife for 21 years before she died of leukemia in 2008. We grew up together and accepted each other without question. The ease of our relationship was because we understood each other through and through. In the last 5 years I dated a number of different women and I have come to find out that many of them don’t understand themselves. While you may classify it ahave s “loving yourself” – I would call it something different. I would call it just knowing yourself. Knowing what you want and what is important to you. Through my dating experiences I have found that many people desire the allure of a relationship, but in being part of a relationship they don’t realize that there are parts of it that require some sacrifice. If you (and I am speaking in the theoretical “you” not you personally Margaret) don’t understand yourself well enough to realize that a relationship is important to you and it is worth some of the sacrifices that are necessary, then a relationship is just not for you. So perhaps that is knowing yourself to love yourself without having to change who you are.
Just some thoughts from a random guy who reads a blog about lingerie. 🙂
Jerry
http://adadandhisboy.blogspot.com