Love When You Least Expect It
Don’t you hate it when people tell you you’ll meet someone when you least expect it? It clashes with all the laws of the universe and makes no sense at all. ‘Good things come to those who wait’, couples assure you. It’s the exact opposite in every other area of life, except perhaps gardening, where we’re encouraged to get proactive. A new job, go for it. A new car, apartment, plasma TV – get an instant loan. Even happiness is yours with the right book, course or shift in attitude. Yet the one thing most of us want most of all – someone to love – allegedly turns up when you’re looking the other way.
It’s a conspiracy developed by concerned mothers to distract single daughters from angsting over finding love. ‘He’ll show up when you’re not looking, you watch. The meek shall inherit the earth’.
So you try to trick yourself, pretend you’re no longer in the game and see if that works. But it’s a major contradiction and a slight risk to switch off all desires of meeting the man of your dreams in the covert hope that the very act of doing that may bring him your way. Like when women get pregnant after buying a puppy.
I was sceptical until it happened to me.
I was under a self imposed moratorium on dating when I met the man I love. After a string of unhappy unions I’d decided to give it a big miss for a while, not in an angry resentful spirit, but in recognising I was repeating a pattern which wouldn’t stop until I did. There was no way I was going through that again.
People ask how we met. There’s the straightforward answer how we were introduced through friends, or the more ethereal response which I suspect has more to do with it: Because I was ready. Ready for kindness. Before then I had a deep suspicion that I didn’t deserve it.
I didn’t reach this enlightened stance all by myself. I found a hypnotherapist whom I instructed to help me attract a good man. I’d been wasting time on the wrong ones because, I’m ashamed to admit, I feared being left alone. You do wonder at this age if this is as good as it gets, your last chance. It nowhere near is.
I set upon a six month boyfriend exile and took a good hard look at myself. ‘Enough’, I told myself. ‘It’s ok to be alone, preferable even, than being with someone who doesn’t get you and maybe, just maybe, you’ll stand a chance of meeting someone who does.’
‘I get you’, was one of the first things my new love said to me. ‘How do you know?’ I asked, sceptical. ‘I just do.’ He beamed at me and squeezed my hand and I cried because it’d been such a long time waiting. ‘Find a man who can fix things,’ an older friend advised. She also recommended one who loves me exactly as I am. I wasn’t sure if that combination was possible but turns out it is.
He does things like dropping a mango at my door because I’d mentioned a craving and stocking his bathroom with facial products for when I stay over. ‘You deserve it’, he says when I tell him how lucky I feel.
‘Love can’t be rushed,’ he’d reply when asked why he was single. ‘I always knew there was someone out there for me,’ he tells me. ‘And I was prepared to wait.’ Perhaps we wouldn’t have liked each other had we met earlier; he drove a ute, for starters. Time has been our friend.
Who knows what’ll happen next but at least it’s restored my faith that love is possible. Perhaps he’s a reward for years of hard work and nothing to show for it. Good things come to those who wait. And those who aren’t looking.