Compassion and truth saves a relationship
by Alan Huyshe
A relationship that had gone stale and distant suddenly changed one day. She said she’d met another man, had been seeing him for more than a month, and she was in love.
I used the new-found courage and “warrior energy” that I had found in myself. I called her to face me and talk about this in person, not do it over the phone. She came and we sat down to talk.
At first, there was a hardness in her that I had never seen before. The old me would simply have caved in to her requests, but now I remembered my mission — connecting with my passion, and with compassion, speaking my Truth. With a pounding heart, I held to my mission. I spoke my truth, with compassion. I told her what I saw in her. I told her compassionately.
We spoke long through the day and into the night. With nothing left now to lose, we spoke truthfully, with a depth of honesty, and risk that we never had used in all those nine years of “being together.”
Over the next month we met regularly and spoke more. Each time I heard her, and let her go. Each time I let her go, she loved me more.
I started to hear more about what she’d found with her new man. While speaking, she also heard herself. We both saw that she had found something with him, something that had been missing with “us.” We also both saw that with him she was not getting most of what had, at first, been there with us, been there before it “got stale,” been there before we let our fear of loss, our fear of “breaking up,” hold us back from our honesty.
As the pressure built in the triangle, another change took place. When the pressure was on her new man, he turned nasty, judgmental, dismissive, accusing, and unforgiving. In contrast, each time the pressure
was on me, I became more loving, more truthful, more understanding, more willing to let her go, to let her walk her own path in life.
We are now very happy together, and that other man is a distant memory. The path hasn’t been easy. We’ve had been much from the old relationship to forgive, to forget, to heal, to own, to grow from, and to change.
I have had to risk everything many times to stand firm and draw my own boundaries. I’ve had to learn to do this with compassion, no matter how fearful or hurting or angry. I learned to be ruthlessly honest about my sadness, my anger and my fear, to do so in a way that was non-blaming while also non-surrendering.
At last, in my fifties, I have become a man, a man with a clear mission, a man with integrity and passion. I have done this by remembering my life mission, by getting strong challenging support from my MKP support group.
I have done this by falling in love with a woman I already loved.
| Alan Huyshe lives in the UK |
– is a deeply personal issue that everyone decides for himself. Sometimes the price is high, sometimes low. But this is not very important for life. Life is an interesting thing. And the price on Viagra – too.
