For love

The things we do for love….

I have got married for love. Twice in fact.

The first time I now realise I never really loved him so maybe I didn’t do that for love but at the time I thought I did. I didn’t even know what love felt like. I married him because that is what you did and then we bought a flat together and then came a baby. No one ever really showed me any other way and he seemed to like me and want to be with me so it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Of course it wasn’t and with time I evolved and grew and became increasingly unhappy. Leaving him was one the best decisions I have ever made. I did it for me, an act of self love and certainly an act of self preservation.

Then I got married again. This time it was most definitely for love. Passionate and intense love which was a true revelation to me and made me realise what love was meant to feel like and what it felt like to be loved. I knew then that I had never been in love before, I had mistaken need and desire and reliance as love. Being in love is joyous and beautiful and powerful and wild and hard and quite frankly amazing.

I truly thought that love was forever but it turns out that was not the case (*or is it) and I will admit that some of what has happened has left me feeling bruised and bitter. I made compromises for that love, which is what you do right? Actually I don’t know that it is. I know for me loving someone, being in love with them, means helping them to be all that they are and encouraging them to find out what that is. As long as it doesn’t involve committing a crime then I want to help and support you be your most amazing self. We make compromises because that is life but we shouldn’t have to compromise the truth of who or what we are and doing so is hugely damaging in the long run.

I now know that our problems ran pretty deep but at the time, over the years, I dismissed things and let things slide because of that love I felt, Confronting things was scary and meant that maybe things were not what I thought they were and so I pushed on through until one day I discovered something I couldn’t ignore any more. I don’t want to go into details. It is private stuff that does no good sharing but it was like opening Pandora’s box and it changed everything for me. I still care about him, in many ways I still love him but I am not in love with him any more. We seem to be muddling through now and being friends but there are days when I am angry and sad. I do feel very let down and what has happened has made me question my judgement. Time is a healer though and so is living a good life. I plan to make sure I do that.

*EDIT Dec 2022 – Moral of the story don’t write things when things are all still raw and hurting which is definitely what I did here. 3 years on from writing this piece I can tell you that Michael and I are very firmly together and very happy and most definitely in love. I realise now I always was, but I was angry and hurt and I wield that against our relationship like a weapon. That was a mistake on my part. It was like he made mistakes and then rather than us dealing with that together and working through it I just went, oh ok, let me make some now too. *laughs. Anyway, more for another post another time but for now, for love….. He is my love.

I will be 50 in a couple of years. Time is ticking and I have things I want to do before I get too old to do them. Understanding myself better and knowing what love looks and feels like means that when it happens again you can see it so very fucking clearly for what it is. I have spent a lot of my life without out being in love but now I know that it is actually hugely important to me and my happiness. When I love I do so intensely and passionately and with my whole self.

Before I met Michael I actually didn’t really believe in love. I thought it was something made up in books and movies, a fantasy idea if you like. I could so easily become jaded and suspicious of love as a result of what has happened between us but whilst it might have made me cautious in some ways it has also helped me to realise how important it is to me and for me to be able to identify it when I feel it. It’s different from anything else. Yes it comes with lust and passion and a fiery energy that can be intoxicating but I have had those things without love and whilst they are wonderful and I am sure I will have them again with others (I certainly plan to) being in love with someone is more than that. I don’t think I have the words for it. After all humans have been trying to capture it in words and pictures and music since the beginning of time and whilst some have done better than others it is a quest that continues to this day. I might not be able to describe it in words without sounding ridiculously cheesy but the one benefit of having experienced it so rarely is that I when I feel it I know exactly what it is.

That does also mean you can hide from it too, something I have certainly been guilty of but that has changed now. No more hiding, only truth.

Of course there are other types of love in my life; I have some truly amazing friends who have truly stepped up to the task of being my friend this year. They have helped me through possibly one the toughest patches of my life. I am not sure I would have got through it without them. I am not going to name names but you ladies know who you are and hopefully you know just how much I love you.

And then there is family. Somehow this one feels so very complicated. I love my two children so very much. I am proud of them every single day I love seeing them evolve and learn who they are but being a parent is also hard fucking work, especially when you are, for the most part, the only parent. I know I have been a good parent, or least I have done my absolute best but I also know that I am ready for some real proper time for me.

I also think this blog deserves a mention because if there is anything that I have dedicated myself to for love it is this space. I am coming up on my 10th blogging anniversary. Yes I know I should do something special to mark it I am just not sure I know what that is right now. However this space has been so important to me over the years. It is been where I have shared my real truthful self in so many ways. It is where I have discovered a passion for photography and a skill for self portraiture. I have honed my writing craft here and managed to carve out a income as a result of my this space. Whilst it doesn’t really earn a great deal in and of itself it has opened doors to me making a living elsewhere in ways I could never have done without it.

However this year I have felt oddly uncomfortable with parts of it. Much of what I have written here has detailed my life with Michael. Our kinky D/s relationship has been a key part of what I have written about and with that changing and being no more I have found myself looking at this space wondering what it is to me now. I have an auto-tweet widget that tweets out past posts each day and I have nearly turned it off a few times now because lots of that back content inspires complicated feelings in me. Looking back on some of it now framed with new eyes is hard but I have resisted the temptation and instead tried to remember it in the context it was written not the place we ended up at.

This blog started just before my relationship with Michael, it has grown with me over the years and there have been times when for various reasons I have felt stifled here in what I can share but now that has changed and whilst there are still some things that are off the table for a little while longer I need to work on moving this space forward with me as I venture on through my life. I need to populate it with new and fresh content. Some of the pictures in particular are hard to look at but they are also part of what bought me to today and I want to embrace that and get to a place where I can truly make peace with everything that has happened and look back on that chapter in my life with as much positivity as I can.

I love my blog. I am hugely proud of what I have created here. I think it might soon be time for a redesign. Maybe I will try to get that ready for my 10th anniversary but mostly I am looking forward to continuing to create content here, to letting it evolve with me as my life changes. I am starting a new chapter in my life which means my blog is doing exactly the same thing.