Bobby Beyond: Finding Your Forever Love

Does the idea of a forever love spark warm embers in your soul, or does it incite decision-freezing doubts? We’re told by every commercial advertising wedding rings that “love is eternal,” songs sing beautiful melodies of twin flames, and movies paint motion pictures with tales of deep romance. It’s challenging to ignore the implied task of finding a specific person to spend the rest of one’s life with as we’re indoctrinated from birth to believe that everyone has a “soulmate”. We see examples of elderly couples being praised for being together for several decades before finally crossing the rainbow road, oftentimes not together, leaving the other alone. On top of that, around 50% of marriages in the United States end in divorce, that’s half of the people who said yes to “till death do us part”. With odds like that, how can anyone believe in forever, or even love?

The pressure to find the perfect partner is insurmountable when looking through the scope of forever. Perhaps to find the best person for the position, we must simply change the lenses in which we’re viewing people through. The current life expectancy is approximately 73.16 years, and the average age of a man’s first marriage is around 30 years old. That means that your “eternity” is about 43 years with someone. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be an enjoyable time. Aside from the length of time, there are also the changes we experience as part of aging. As we age, our needs, dreams, desires, fears, beliefs, humor, and so much more, evolve as we do. When shedding our cocoons and spreading our wings, we must find other butterflies to spend our time with.

 

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I’m not saying your partner can’t or won’t evolve with you, however, the statistics say that there’s a 50% chance one of you will remain a caterpillar. Couples can grow together, and they can grow apart. Just as the seasons change and we need different clothes for different weather, so do our needs for the people in our lives. With the focus being on forever, one can lose sight of their needs in the present. I believe we’ve mistakenly been searching for that “forever love” in other people when we should be instilling it within ourselves. The only person you’ll have in the very end, after all, is yourself. To find the one who will love you forever, you must first learn to love yourself.

Loving oneself lights a torch that can be seen for miles. It’ll attract many, and not all will admire another person’s self-love. Some will feel so envious that someone has mastered a skill that they cannot, and they will try to tear them apart. You must stay strong and hold out for the ones that come along to admire your light. They will relish in your beacon of self-love, opening their hearts as well. You’ll see people for their truest intentions when you let them speak for themselves instead of projecting your own narratives upon them. Their words can be of beauty like gemstones, and actions like gravel in a dark quarry.

 

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It can feel like you’re mining for gold. Sometimes you’re so desperate that you start seeing things that aren’t there. Sometimes you’ll find fool's gold, and it will trick you into thinking you’ve found the real thing. Other times you’ll get so upset that you’ll give up entirely. Throughout your sifting, you’ll find many rocks of all shapes and sizes. You can search for hours, days, months, years… and you may never find it. That is until a butterfly floats in and lands on your heart. That’s when you realize instead of looking for love, we must let it find us. Love doesn’t need a GPS to find you, it just needs to see your beacon. Learn to enjoy the love you find, and lose the forever.

"Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time." — Maya Angelou

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