“Deep Discussion with Jed: Relationships (Part III)”

It's Magic!

Continued from Part II.

My first, impulsive answer was "magic," but that's a copout and I admitted it immediately. My real answer is, "a strong sense of self." That is, really knowing who you are is an important part of deeply loving someone else, and of being loved deeply by that other person.

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, what you like, despise, or are ambivalent about, what matters to you... somehow, knowing these things seems to make it easier to know other people, and you must know someone to love someone.

Perhaps you see your values (that is, those things that you feel are important or precious) reflected in the other person's attitudes and behavior. Intentionally or not, you positively reinforce those things, and the same happens to you reciprocally.

Knowing yourself allows you to know why you love someone else.

I'm not trying to say that the person you love needs to be just like you! In fact, if you know yourself to be a risk taker, you might find a conservative person all that much more attractive for the balance brought to your life. Those are opposed personality traits, which are not the same as opposed values.

You can certainly have a good relationship without great self-understanding, but love almost always takes effort to build and maintain (and it's more than worth the effort you put into it), and a lot of that effort will be wasted if you don't even know what matters to you in the first place, or what matters to you about the other person and your relationship!

Having said that, I still can't deny the magic. Corinne and I share a wonderful relationship, and while my efforts to explain it might come close, there is some undefined aspect that's been there from the very beginning which ties us together in a way which neither of us have ever felt before.

The result of that magic, of that wonderful spell that was cast on us more than five years ago (on our very first date), was a new life. I'm not speaking in symbols, I'm being literal: it's a life that all of our friends and family have seen with their own eyes.

We call this new life "Us." "Us" is not a life of flesh and blood like she and I are made, but a life nonetheless. It's a combination of Corinne and I, of our senses-of-self and our understanding of each other, and we've raised it as our own child from the day it was born. We're both very careful with little "Us", because it's such a huge part of each of our lives.

Speaking for myself (which is really all I can do), I think of Us as a third person in our relationship, like a child, which I actually love as much (hmm... or almost as much) as I love Corinne.

I enjoy talking about this kind of thing. Our friends and family all seem to recognize that Corinne and I have something breathtaking and beatiful, and that's not the kind of thing one is ever ashamed to discuss.

We have friends, the Beebes, that have been married for more than 50 years and their "Us" has grown up with them - but somehow it never grew old, and I think that's part of the magic. Jim and Betty are two very happy, silly, and wise people, and I pray that our "Us" grows up to be as beautiful as theirs someday.