on a cloudy night, when nothing seems above...still, there is love

While sitting in Bavaria Café yesterday, I overheard a Skype conversation between a young woman sitting at the table to my left, and her boyfriend back in the States.  What began as an upbeat and lovely conversation quickly catapulted to another extreme when her boyfriend proudly announced his exciting news.  He’d been offered a job working as a life coach for underprivileged kids in Boston.  The job didn’t pay much, but, as she knew, it was something he’d wanted to do for a long time, and the school had offered to cover his room and board for the duration of his employment.  The young woman, in Xela to study Spanish, was silent as she listened to him describe the job in further detail.  Once he’d finished, and after a somewhat uncomfortable pause, he prompted her to share her thoughts.  What happened next made me cringe.

The first words out of the woman’s mouth were not celebratory, they weren’t congratulatory, and they certainly were not those of a woman who loved this man.  Instead, all this young woman could offer was a “you know that this means we’ll be living apart for a year and that you won’t be making any money in the meantime...”  I could hear the man’s enthusiasm deflate as he spent the next twenty minutes trying to persuade his girlfriend that this was his opportunity to shine.  The conversation ended with a curt “we’ll discuss this later because I have homework,” followed by the slap of the computer screen hitting the keyboard.  Within moments, she turned to her classmate to relay the selfish ways of her “soon-to-be-former-boyfriend.”  I wanted to scream.  Loving is supposed to be selfless, not selfish.

There are things that people want for themselves…sometimes these things change, sometimes they compromise, and sometimes they disappear as if they never even existed.  It is the beauty of desire that what is desired is not something you cannot live without.  Then, there are needs… those things that define someone, that make a person feel whole… things that give life its purpose.  Often times, these needs don’t change, disappear, or compromise, and they are not things a person can live without.  To truly love someone is to be satisfied with those things that can compromise and to respect those things that cannot.

As my summer in Xela comes to a close, I find this lovers’ quarrel particularly relevant.  In one way or another, I spent a great deal of my life compromising those things about me that could not be compromised, and at the end of the day, I couldn’t understand why my direction in life felt foreign or why my relationships were often nothing more than distractions and space-fillers.  This place, this experience, and these people… they all helped me to see that the person I actually am is far greater than any person I could ever try to imitate, and if I don’t crave the best for me in my life, I’ll never ever find it.

So, with that being said… to little miss’ boyfriend back in the States, go find the person who says, “go do what you gotta do… my only requirement is that you shower when you get home.”  Your heart will thank you for it.