Love Is Like A Shark

It's survival of the fittest, the biologists say, while the physicist rhapsodizes about gravity, acceleration, mass and space-time. But the most powerful force in your personal universe is a simple truth: we become what we think about. Add this vital corollary: to change your circumstances, change the way you think about them.

You may consider yourself to be a victim of random negative thoughts. The truth is, as long as you think you are, you are. It's far more likely you're using those negative thoughts to keep yourself and others stuck and imprisoned in the self-created cell of bitterness. If your love has turned to bitterness, it's past time to make a choice, a wrenching choice, but a necessary one: redemption or moving on.

Living a lie is a fool's game. Harboring bitterness, having a secret regret that makes your daily life a hollow shell of activity and numbness, benefits no one. Are you staying together out of habit or expediency? Out of fear of the unknown? More of the same is all you'll get.

I knew a young woman who discovered an awful secret about her husband. He had a child he never told her about, a child he'd ignored and denied, and when the financial and emotional consequences of that secret came rolling in she knew she had enough. She was just numb. She'd endured so much, but this was just too much. It was time to ask him to leave. She met someone else and now has a happiness beyond anything she'd imagined.

I know another couple with multiple problems that keep them alternating between rage and painful contrition. They are both hurt and feel betrayed. They take a step toward reconciliation and two steps back into separate lives and separate hopes, between the yearning for security and the hope for true healing and the awful compulsion to just protect their own interests and hide their true hearts from each other. Each casts a covetous eye toward independence, or back to the carefree days when they had an adventure of their own. Behind all the hurt and regret they still love each other, but there are so many mines in the minefield that too often a kind word or a tender gesture gets lost in a spasm of fear, and they both retreat in hurt and haste. What a broken place they are both in, wanting to be loved, longing for embraces and the freedom to play together, but so scarred by their separate and shared pasts that the sustaining moments of affection are few and far between. They are starving and filling up on empty calories of broken emotion. They feel a constant salt sting of disappointment. Their love endures, but barely.

I feel for that man and woman and all those I know who feel alone. Trust and belonging are the two biggest treasures in the world. We scarcely know how fragile they are when we burst out looking for them, coming together for our first hopeful dance. The exhilaration eventually fades. Then begins the hard work of sustaining and feeding hope, and living in faith and faithfulness. Love is a like a shark. But it doesn't have to die. We can change things by changing the way we look at them.