Learning to love

My path to happiness lies in my ability to love - first, to love myself; second, to love others. When the love will come from me, when it won't depend on anyone else, when there will be no stopping it - I will heal. And I will be able to start healing others. Yesterday, I tried loving unconditionally. I failed midway and I was the one who felt miserable.

Yesterday me and my husband celebrated our 12th anniversary. We drove around the city to find a specific Lego set for our son before leaving him with our daughter so that we could spend the night at a hotel, just the two of us. We've been to two stores already and none had the particular set that he wanted. I was parking the car when my husband finally snapped. "You can't park there, it's a red line." I have many emotional wounds that I'm still licking. One of them is "I can't do anything right." My husband's comment touched my wound, and it hurt. I tried concentrating on the day, on our happy purpose. For a few seconds, I succeeded, then I lost control. "Maybe you'd like to drive the car yourself if you don't like how I'm doing it?" The second I said it, I knew I was up for hours of misery. In this moment, I didn't love myself. Instead of viewing my husband's comment as a screaming desire for help, an unmet need of being heard, the need that has been haunting him since he was a kid, I heard judgement. Why? Because I think I'm not worthy of love, and, therefore, his comment was about me, not about him. I always expect people to slap me, mock me, abuse me. I won't be able to expect others to love me until I learn to always love myself. If I did, I would have heard him, heard his frustration with himself and understood that it has nothing to do with me. Instead, I projected it onto myself. We continued our dialog to each other, literally - him speaking to himself and me speaking to myself.
- You never believe me!
- Can you please let me do the driving? Can you please stop trying to control me?
- You better go find another parking spot before we get a ticket.
- You're really hurting me right now, it takes me a lot not to...
- You never listen to me!
And on it went. I fell quiet, my usual response. He tried talking to me in bursts, giving me facts about traffic due to the game, his usual response. It took us 2 hours to process this. My typical end result is an inability to talk. I literally go into a stupor. His typical end result is trying to ignore me, as nothing he does brings me out of it. Two hours later, at a hotel, he made the first step. He apologized. Like a miracle, his apology gave me an ability to talk. It used to take us days, yesterday it took us only 2 hours.

I was astounded at how clearly I could see that my happiness does not depend on his happiness, and vice versa. As two adults living together, all we have to do it to take each other as we are and not give our ability to be happy to one another. When we do that, when we depend on each other, we break our happiness. When we are responsible for ourselves, we are happy.

I am only beginning to learn to love. The only way for me to learn it is by practicing love, every day, every hour, every moment. It is very hard to do something when you don't know how to. I had not much experience being loved as a child, and I can only learn from being loved as an adult. It takes all my mental power to switch myself away from being reactive in the moment I described. I also learn from reading books. The most recent one was given to me by a friend, called "The Mastery of Love" by Miguel Ruiz. It helped me a lot.