Delayed In Love

I heard a woman say something today that might be completely delusional.

And I cannot stop thinking about it.

Her theory was that if you are a woman with a larger mission in this world, your great love story may not arrive until you are actually living in alignment with that mission.

Because anyone who comes before you are fully aligned with yourself has the potential to keep you from becoming who you are supposed to be.

Maybe that’s delusional.

And I don’t know that I believe it exactly as she said it.

I don’t believe women have to become perfectly healed or fully realized before they are worthy of great love. I don’t believe every relationship that comes before some magical moment of “alignment” is destined to hold us back.

But there is something in what she said that I understand differently now.

Because I know what it feels like to love someone so deeply that I was willing to make myself smaller to keep him.

I was willing to settle.

I was willing to sacrifice pieces of myself.

I was willing to tolerate things that violated my own values because losing him felt more painful than losing parts of myself.

And perhaps most significantly, I was willing to abandon, or at least postpone, this persistent belief I have carried for years that I am here to do something more.

I loved him that much.

Which is why discovering the complicated webs of deception and betrayal absolutely destroyed me.

Walking away from him completely was one of the most painful things I have ever done.

But I think sometimes about what would have happened if I hadn’t.

What if I had gotten what I wanted?

What if he had stayed?

What if I had forgiven enough, rationalized enough, and made myself small enough to keep the relationship alive?

I know the answer now.

I would not be here.

Not geographically.

Here.

In this version of myself.

Because the deeper truth for me isn’t that the right man couldn’t arrive until I became the woman I was meant to be.

It’s that until I was willing to stop leaving myself, I could not reliably choose a love that did not ask me to disappear.

And I was still leaving myself.

Over and over again.

The last few years have been an absolute incinerator.

I have experienced loss, betrayal, grief, public pressure, responsibility, endings, reinvention, and the destruction of things I once believed would always be part of my life.

And somehow, the fire did not make me smaller.

It forged me.

It expanded me in ways I could never have imagined.

It stripped away identities, relationships, obligations, expectations, and versions of myself that no longer fit.

And underneath all of it, I have found more of me.

Not the person I was before everything happened.

Someone I could not have become without moving through it.

I do not think pain is a requirement for purpose, or that suffering automatically makes us wiser. I would never romanticize what happened to me or pretend the betrayal was somehow necessary.

But I do know that refusing to return to what diminished me changed the direction of my life.

And for the first time, I can feel with extraordinary clarity that all of these roads have been leading somewhere.

I don’t know exactly where yet.

But I know I am closer to my true self than I have ever been.

I know I am finally listening to the part of me that has whispered for years that I am here for something more.

I know I am no longer willing to sacrifice that woman for the privilege of being loved.

And maybe this is where I join the woman from the video in being a little delusional.

Because I believe there is a reason I have been given this particular path.

I believe there is a reason I survived everything that tried to break me.

I believe there is a reason my life has expanded so dramatically after so much of it burned down.

And I believe all of these roads have led me here for a purpose much greater than I ever imagined.

Maybe there is another great love story somewhere on that road, too.

I hope there is.

But maybe I haven’t been delayed in love at all.

Love has come.

Love has gone.

And each time, I have learned. I have healed. I have grown.

Each love has brought me closer to understanding myself, what I am here to do, and the life I believe I was created to live.

So maybe the love still ahead of me isn’t late.

Maybe it is simply part of a much larger design I could not see before.

A design that has been revealing itself through every road I have traveled, every ending I did not choose, every time I have been called forward, and every version of my life I have had to leave behind.

And maybe I am delusional.

But I believe God has been leading me somewhere.

I believe there is purpose in the life I have been given and in the person I am.

And I believe that if there is a great love waiting for me, it will not require me to step away from that purpose in order to have it.

It will belong there, too.

And perhaps, after a lifetime of loving people who were never truly worthy of the love I gave them, part of God’s design is a love that finally is.