What Happened When I Started Believing That Relationships Could Be Easy - Guest Post by Shannon Clarke, Transformational Coach
If you get Diana's emails, you'll know that she brings the truth. In a recent email, Diana wrote about how many of us like the “bad,” emotionally unavailable guys, and this is rooted in believing that love must feel hard. I used to be that person. Here is my story about how I changed this belief and manifested the love I'd been yearning for. My hope in sharing this with you is that it sparks a tiny ember of hope, opens a tiny crack to let yourself believe that the love you crave is not only possible but absolutely available to you.
My love story begins when I realized the pattern of attracting the unavailable guys, the hard love wasn't serving me. The real breaking point in realizing something needed to change was in chasing a guy for two years who just wasn't that into me.
We weren't meant to be together (he knew quite early on, but I was convinced I could change his mind). Perhaps he was further along in his love journey than I was. Here's how that played out.
Right before meeting him, I was online dating and not finding anyone who I felt was really 'my people.' In fact, I don't think I'd really found my people broadly (not just my man). I'd just moved back to Ottawa after living overseas for a year and was inside of re-discovering myself. I remember realizing the guy for me wasn't going to be sitting at their computer, he would be out there, on the trails where I was. So, I shut down the ol' online dating account and went out and happened to find myself at an outdoor show. I ended up chatting to two guys at a booth who were talking about adventure racing. One of those guys was just magnetic...we hit it off right away, went on a date and I was smitten. It was like I followed my intuition and BOOM - perfect guy appeared.
The reality is though...he wasn't the perfect guy. We spent all our time together just hanging out and I was convinced he was the guy for me. I could imagine us walking down the aisle, raising kids, living a blissful, adventurous life...it was so clear, I could feel it! The real-life edition of that dream was like living on a different planet.
We never really even kissed...just hung out like best friends. He was there any time I needed a warm hug or an ear. But he wasn't there in all the other ways....I have to imagine he just wasn't brave enough to tell me how he felt and I certainly wasn't brave enough to ask or tell him how I felt. TWO YEARS I lived in this dystopia - my brain drunk on the visions, while my heart was yearning for more.
It was when a friend said “Shannon, why don't you believe you're worthy of real love?” and at the same time, two other friends started talking to me about their aha moments in therapy that I realized that the world was aligning to tell me to go inward. Finding my man first required me TRULY finding myself.
Enter two years of work: two years of internal unraveling about what I'd learned growing up, and beginning to question if that was the love I wanted to manifest. I had a beautiful childhood. My parents loved me, we always felt as though our basic needs were met, we adventured and laughed and played and cultivated cherished family traditions.
Inside of that though were gaps in learning and practicing exquisite self-love, self-compassion, realizing that making mistakes is all part of living, that perfection isn't the goal, but most importantly believing in myself enough to take up space to say "I am worthy of my needs being met...and here they are". I honestly am not sure I truly loved myself.
I remember being at a workshop a couple of years later which started with a gorgeous meditation where we were guided to drink from a beautiful goblet of light and love and feel it filling up our entire bodies, each cell, the space between each cell. As I sat there, imagining myself holding the goblet I felt nothing of the light and love that our guide was describing. I kept wanting to feel it, striving to feel it. And then it hit me - I hadn't even taken a sip from the goblet!
That moment made me realize that perhaps somewhere inside I still wasn't sure I was worthy of real love....and that I just needed to take a sip and start letting love in. Start feeling ALL THE LOVE THAT RESIDES WITHIN MYSELF and that is available to me at any time. This love is bigger than me, you, finding a man, it's the love that fuels our world....the love that connects us all.
When I write this, I can feel it, deep inside my belly. It's the most enduring, warm, unconditional, life-giving essence. And it's in me. It was in me the whole time. Everything that I ever wanted, everything that I ever needed was right here for me and will always be here for me.
I had been dating someone at that time...a wonderful, love-struck, beautiful, kind soul. This time, I found myself on the flip side of the equation; he just wasn't the guy for me. Our love wasn't the love that was based in that pure essence that I now knew. And so I let him go....freed him to continue on his journey and gave myself permission to continue on mine.
As I look back, I realize that the reality is that finding a person to make magic with along our journeys requires that our paths cross at just the right time. There's no explaining when it's going to happen or why. It's just magic.
For that magic to occur though, I couldn't be walking aimlessly hoping to catch someone else's trail, I needed to trust my own path, trust my own journey, trust that the moments of solitude (or single-ness) were necessary and safe and love-filled in their own ways.
In July of that same year, my best friend and I were dreaming up a trip to Africa. We'd entered a contest and for some reason, I was just setting myself up to win it. I left my gorgeous apartment and moved in with my mom so I could be available to leave whenever it was time. I bought myself a ring to remind me of the commitment I'd made to myself - to commit to loving myself always, to trusting myself, to plugging into mentors when they appeared, to trust my intuition and the universe.
In August, our group of friends planned a big canoe trip to celebrate the birthdays of my bestie and her pal. That year we all met up at a campsite and the fun began. A new friend (Dan) joined the group - one of the best friends of a guy one of the girls was dating. I remember meeting Dan for the first time. A tall guy wearing a hat with a pom-pom on top, smiling the biggest smile, just himself. As he paddled himself along (he'd come at the last minute so was solo paddling), I'd hear him singing songs to himself. He was nice, kind, and funny.
After the camping trip, he and other friends came to a party at my house. He just fit. He just slid into our little world of happiness and hilarity like he'd been there the whole time. He was so nice. So kind. So warm. So lovely. Like the light and love in the goblet...
He called one day and asked me to go on a date. Nothing fancy. No weirdness. Just asked me. It was so.....easy. I said yes.
The following Friday was to be our date. We didn't have any plans. I went home to get changed. I was cat-sitting for my sister. It was a hot day. I remember coming home and seeing Alex (the cat) lying on the floor as I came home. I said hello and gave him a pet. He went to get up, but his two back legs weren't supporting him. As I rushed to the phone to call my sister and the vet, Alex followed me down the stairs, thumping along. I called Dan to let him know that I needed to get to the vet. Dan was living about an hour and a half away from where I lived, so he said he'd meet me at the vet's office. When he arrived, I was on the phone with my sister as I described what the vet was doing....Dan came in with such empathy....we gave each other an awkward hug.
We spent the bulk of our date hanging out with Alex at the vet's office and then when the vet said we could take Alex home and continue the treatment of Alex's illness ourselves (giving him needles, taking his temperature, etc.), we took on the challenge. Dan went to get a pizza, a thermometer, and some Vaseline (to help with all the up-the-cat's-butt temperature taking we were going to need to be doing), and we met up back at my house to care for Alex for the night.
We played games, we cuddled, we had our first kiss. Somewhere in there, Alex passed away. We carefully honoured his little life and shared the news with my sister. That was our first date. It has since become known as "the cat story" and we told it at our wedding.
I knew within three dates that he was the man I wanted to spend my life with. He later told me that he thought I might be the girl of his dreams when he first met me on that camping trip. It just felt right...it just felt easy. It just felt like all the dreams I'd ever had coming true. When I asked him if he'd ever imagined love to feel so easy, I remember him saying that he had always hoped it would. He has a lot purer faith than I do. Trust in the journey. Trust in the natural timing of things. Trust is easy.
It turns out that Dan and I have crossed paths many times in our life. We were at the same music competition in high school. We both rowed in university and were at the same regattas. We were both in the UK in the same period of time as young people. I keep imagining that somewhere out there in the world is a picture of the two of us, unaware of the existence of the other, but still there at the same moments in time.
We were meant to meet...we would have eventually met had we not met on that camping trip. At a friend's wedding...another party.....something. Our journeys collided that day and now we continue to choose to walk our journeys together. We still have our own paths, we just continue to choose to walk them side by side.
At our wedding, I remember standing up in front of our family and friends telling them how I'm not sure I really knew what love was before meeting Dan. As I sit here writing....thirteen years since we first met, I think it's important to keep remembering that real love is magic. Real love is there inside of us all, alive and present, waiting for us to turn towards it. To share that with another human being is a true gift of life, a magical collision of two souls that are meant to cross paths. At least, that's what I like to believe.
XO,
Shannon
Join Shannon and me for a deep dive chat into how she manifested love, on Dec. 9th, 2020 @ 12 pm EST, here in my private Facebook group.
As a transformational coach, Shannon Clarke's goal is to help you tap into your true purpose and identify your most authentic, best version of you. She holds sacred space for you to draw out your soul's whispers, your limiting beliefs, and all the things that are not being said. She believes that when we let our inner light and love shine, the whole world is made better.
Learn more at www.shannonclarkecoaching.com. Catch her #DeepThoughts as she journeys through life on Instagram at shannon_clarke_coaching.