I was afraid of love. I know it might look like I was looking for love, but I was really following what A Course in Miracles describes as “the ego’s dictate”: seek and do not find.
What drove this attraction, as it has done many others before, was a hidden belief that love is dangerous. That if I fully dive into my love for my husband, it will engulf me, swallow me whole. There’ll be no “me” left. Just like when I was a young girl and my mum’s alcoholism drowned the whole family in her sorrows.
What drove this attraction was the possibility that I might be deeply, unwaveringly loveable. That it might actually be possible to be in love, on purpose and successful.
What drove this attraction was a subconscious drive, handed down through generations of women in my family, to sabotage happiness and push love away. I’m one of the lucky ones, married to my soul mate. This cannot possibly last. I must create trouble at base camp.
The work I live by and teach reminds me daily that I have a choice about who I want to be in the middle of my struggle. Deny what is happening inside of me, and I set myself up for a fall.
Tell the truth, and I make way for love.
So I shared it with Nige. All of it. It was hard. I felt swamped with shame. But I did it anyway. I probably saved my marriage in the process, and I’ll do it again if I have to.
I want to cheat on my husband some days.
But I want to know him, and to be known by him, more than I want to prove my fears right.
And that, my friends, is why I tell the truth.