Partnership

I've been really worried about us lately. A partnership I cannot stand is one where each partner is living their own separate life, only sharing what they must share. I am in a relationship because I want it to add something to me, and I want to feel that I am adding something to you.

It used to be fun to make fun and be sarcastic of whom I'm with, thinking that this means that we're so close, we know each other so well and we're so comfortable with each other that we can tease each other and be sarcastic and take that lightly. Growing older and being lonely for so long, I never understood how couples would not value each other so much and would not be tremendously caring of each other, whether in private or in public. I made a vow to myself that I do not want to take my partner lightly and I do not want to be sarcastic of my partner, because she will be so valuable when I find her and she would deserve much better than that. I was feeling terrrible lately that part of my reactions were that I was starting to take you lightly and I was starting to bring my old sarcastic self to the surface to counter the negligence feeling I developed from you.

I realized that most of my sarcasm was internal. Internal because I have been fighting myself for so long to stop that sarcastic atittude of mine, and because I promised myself not to introduce that to any relationship I have. But that internal sarcasm was developing as a reaction to your admiting that I should accept your sarcasm about me, and to my feeling that you're not appreciative of me, and that all we're doing is trying to listen to you. I might've been wrong in interpreting that.

I never talk to people whom I don't feel are listening and whom I don't feel they understand. I also never listen to those whom I don't feel they're worth listening to. In a previous relationship, I wasn't able to talk and to share because I felt I was always being judged. Everything I said I felt I'm being judged by, being evaluated, and being reduced to a trivial set of labels which do not define me. What was happening now is different though. I felt unappreciated, and I value my mind too much for it to be unappreciated. And while in other situations I'd take it lightly, in a relationship in which I'm expecting to get so much out of, it affects me strongly. In a relationship that is so core and defines a big part of me, small reactions develop into large feelings, and to reduce those strong feelings which are developing in a direction you don't want, you build a barrier and then start reducing the relationship to a lighter state of affairs. But I do not want that. I do not want a light relationship. I want an intense relationship. One that is at the core of my life, shapes the person that I am, and makes me whole. How can something make me whole that is light, separate and unimportant! I feel dissatisfied when the image of what I want out of a relationship is distorted. It scares me to think that my feelings and flood of emotions would end up being supressed and detached from me because the relationship is not allowing them to be.

I have come to realize today that you have been depressed, that your work --which to a great extent defines who you are-- is not going your way, and that can be a destructive factor. I have come to realize that maybe I was not listening to you well enough, not listening to your feelings and your needs, and only considering my needs and what I want. I did not see how the turn of events at your work, and the turning point in your career is affecting you. I do understand however. I understand what you're going through. I wish I could provide support, but I know it can only be from within yourself.

I've been trying to tell you who I was and how I've become what I am. Brought my handwritten notebook once in hope of reading excerpts of it to you. To get a taste of the dreamer I was, the ambitious and at times naive character that was. Felt you're not interested, so didn't expose. But I want you to fight your fight differently, and I don't want you to fade like I did. You said something that struck me today, that work is not important to me! I don't speak about it because it is so important to me, and because I am so immensely dissapointed in it. I am dissapointed in myself. I took it at this country at many times, and its partly true, but the real truth is that its me. Its me, not doing the right thing, and not putting the right effort. I have learnt to deal with that, and I have reached a somehwat satisfactory state. I have mostly become at peace with what I am and what I'm becoming. I have let go, and while I would've demeaningly looked down at such an atittude in the past, I am accepting it and accepting who I am now with much satisfaction. My discovery of sufism, and my approach to God and His power in that last year has helped me reach this state. Its a state of power which I derived from my tremendous weakness that I felt. Its a power that I feel by knowing my limitations. Its the control I gain by knowing how much we don't control. Its the sanity I have by knowing that I'd become insane thinking that what I want is what I'll get, regardless of who I am. Its the satisfaction I get by trying and then accepting the results. Yes, its also partly loving myself, for the qualities that God created in me, for the uniqueness of who I am, from His qualities that are abundant in His creations. I begin now a new journey, realizing how trivial my initial goals where, which turned my life around, controlled me, and made me think that those goals are what defines me, and achieving them are what makes me what I want to be --as if what I wanted to be is worthwhile enough. In that journey, I am in search of a meaning.