Our relationship

Julia and I have been together for about ten years now, which is an interesting fact. We considered ourselves "together" before we laid eyes on each other in person. Why? We had spent many hours with each other via email and by daily, hours-long phone conversations. The odds are great that we knew each other better by the time we saw each other for the first time than most dating couples can claim after a year of dating.

In setting up this website, one of our intentions was to tell our own story. It is a story we have told before, using Julia's blog as the vehicle. In that case, we told it one chapter at a time over many months. Here, we will tell it the same way, but we will condense the timeline. Given that the entire purpose of this new blog is to discuss relationship dynamics and how to make one work, it only makes sense for us to get our story up and visible over a shorter timeframe.

Today, we begin at the beginning. I will post another chapter in the story in a couple of days.

----(Julia's part of the story)

After my comments about “looking for love” in my last blog entry, someone wrote me today and asked how I met my husband, Rick. It’s a really cool story, and will take more space than I’m going to allot to one blog entry, so I’ll tell it in installments!

First, I’ll start with a little background. I was married for the first time when I was 23, to someone who was just not right for me. He was my first earth-shaking love, and it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that we were just not suited for each other, no matter how much we loved each other at essence. I kept the voice inside that was trying to tell me that well-muted for a number of years, until finally, it could not be denied anymore. Our relationship lasted about five years total, but our marriage, only 15 months. Interestingly, I had severe migraine headaches during exactly the period of time we were together. Once we split up, the migraines only came back once, and again, it was when I was not being honest with myself.

I have deduced that migraines are common occurrences when you are lying to yourself about something important—when you are not heeding your inner guidance. Not saying that’s the only cause—just that it seems to be consistent with my observations of myself and others. I learned somewhere that when the frequencies of your left and right brain hemispheres are different, it can cause migraines. Kind of makes sense with my theory, doesn’t it? Anyway, while I was crazy about my first husband, and he loved me a lot, it was a serious mismatch. I’m sure there was a karmic component to our being together, and I still feel a bond with him, but it was a powerful move in the right direction when we split up. I’m happy to say that, even though we made lousy partners, we have a nice relationship now, and he and his wife—who is very cool—have both read Recreating Eden and bought copies for friends and family. I hope to see them when I’m in North Carolina this spring.

After my marriage, I had quite an active social life, and it took me a number of relationships to see a pattern emerging: I was always magnetizing unavailable men. My first husband had been unavailable emotionally. I had another boyfriend that was still hung up on his first love and wasn’t available—actually, make that 2 boyfriends hung up on lost loves. And there were the ones that just weren’t that into me, and the one that, when things got to the deep-heart intimacy stage, freaked out and pulled away (now that’ll do a number on you!). There was one that worked on the pipeline in Alaska and was only around for two weeks of every five, and then there were (I’m sad to say) the married ones or engaged ones, or otherwise involved ones. If a man was unavailable, I was like a magnet to him. And, in many ways, that suited me fine. It was easier to be involved with a man that was unavailable. That way, I didn’t have to commit (This was something I wasn’t cognizant of at the time, but that I figured out in a later analysis). And I’m a “keep my options open” type—a “P-type” in the Myers-Briggs personality inventory. Being involved with unavailable men suited me—but only sort-of. There was a deep longing in me for true partnership—a longing to be with a man who would consider me the “love of his life,” and with whom I could build a life. Continually being involved with unavailable men did little or nothing for my self esteem, and I felt guilty about the relationships with men who were involved with other women. But for some reason, I kept creating relationships with the old pattern until one day, I just said “ENOUGH! I refuse to keep doing this! I will not be in any relationship at all until I can break this sick pattern!” And the universe took me at my word.

Eight years passed in which I did not have so much as one single, solitary date. I had erected a psychic barrier that was so powerful, I not only didn’t attract men, I did not come across one man that I was even vaguely interested in! It was as if that part of my life was utterly non-existent. And for someone who was still attractive and that had always had lots of interactions with men (as you may have surmised by my partial list of relationships above) it was quite a phenomenon to live such a life of relationship abstinence.

But all that was going to change in 1997…

I’ll tell you more of my relationship saga soon!

----(Rick's part of the story)

It only seems fitting that the story be told from both points of view, so I will chime in and take the story from the beginning to the same point that Julia has, this time from my perspective.

My first marriage was later than Julia’s: I was 28 when I got married in 1982, two and a half years after I returned home to Denver after four years in the Air Force. My first wife is the mother of all those step children you hear about now and again in Julia’s blog.

By 1995, our relationship had soured to the point that it was simply a matter of time before it ended. We separated in 1996. I then embarked on what I now see as the gradual opening of my eyes and raising of my vision. My own sense of self had been badly damaged—or, more likely, was badly damaged at the time I got married—and I needed time and relationships based more on esteem for ourselves first, and then what we could each bring to a relationship. A lovely woman who lived in the mountains east of Los Angeles and I had a relationship that lasted about four months and several trips to that beautiful part of California. We are still friends today and email each other a few times a year. Our relationship was an important step for me, because we treated each other as equals each entitled to the nurturing we could offer ourselves, and then to the magic we could build together. The magic, as it turned out, was more imagined than real.

In mid-1997, I met a woman who lived in Colorado Springs, and we were very close for a few months. I now see the value and meaning in having known this person (we are not in communication today). It was during my relationship with her that I began the long climb out of the pit of very low self-esteem I had fallen into over a period of years. She was such a loving and giving soul, and she was very healing for me. Again, though, the magic wasn’t what we both thought we saw at first. When I would talk about what I envisioned as our future, she was kind about it but clearly didn’t share my vision. I was still seeing her when I met Julia. At this point, I will let Julia take the story forward and add my comments when she does.