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Her statement addressed something I’m quite confident every woman in my demographic feels.

She graduated to a point of awareness about it. “I always thought that because I was unstable, only an unstable person would love me,” she said.

Herein lies the biggest reason people who attract with these background stories find polarizing people to meet their “instability” in the middle, which never leaves enough time for true intimacy. It’s always “trying” to stabilize.

Herein lies why ambivalent women who’ve grown up pulled in 50 different directions think stable relationships just might kill them of boredom.

Herein lies the reason for intimacy drama that never adds up, but we can’t help but notice its constant subtraction.

The thing is, what she means by “unstable” is different than unstable.

What she really means is, “I react in such a succinct dance with other people’s reactions to me that I can’t help but notice the nuances when they happen and recoil in fear that it might be something I’ve done, and I respond accordingly, which doesn’t always come across the healthiest.” In a nutshell, anyway.

She actually experiences destabilization in the presence of a relationship, like a majority of my demographic.

In truth, it’s more fair to say that relationships themselves are the things that make her feel “unstable.”

Because she attracts from the program something like “relationships are unstable so to be in one, I cannot stay stable or I will not be able to maintain the relationship.”

It’s a deeply embedded, unarticulated programming playing itself out that hasn’t been given a name but holds a wildly important position on the field.

It’s real.

It’s deep.

It’s…a lifetime of seesawing relationships that never balance each other out, nor do the players know when to move on to new playground equipment. (Tisk! Tisk! I did not imply separation in that last sentence. The implication is to walk to new equipment together.)

Know anyone like this? Who can’t really be in or out of a relationship? Who’s the girl-who-has-it-all type but she can’t get the relationship thing together? She chooses slop because to stabilize she believes she must clean up.

That’s how life taught her to be. Or, when a relationship appears to be too clean, she becomes slop because she has zero idea what her role is in stability. She doesn’t yet know herself here. Plus, it’s probably a less creative life.

Well, let me say…

I used to be her. And I work with hers-of-old every day who’ve found stability of self in the comfort of a stable relationship. Those who’ve rejected domestication, rebelled against needing primary relationships, but with these same strongly held beliefs jump mindlessly into voids that look just like the thing they’re trying to avoid on the outside and feel nothing but pitch black on the inside.

Domestication is a fondness for the functional art of life. Nothing more, nothing less. More to do with our relationship with life than our roles with our partners.

So when the time comes that you surrender to your inner animal nudging at you that it’s time to settle into the fondness rather than continue to meet life’s functional art with friction, know this:

There is a stable person in this world who may not have met you yet but already knows you and loves the f*ck out of you.

They see your moods as cute, your demons as tamable, your cuteness as sexy, and your needs and demands as perfectly you (which doesn’t mean you don’t annoy them often).

They will repair with you the nuance that feels “off” to you and will not shame you for questioning it.

They will hug you when you are hurt; they won’t hurt you more for being hurt.

When you are happy, they will laugh with you, not suck you dry of it.

Their stability is the thing that makes you easy to love. Because they don’t take you personally. They take you as a whole person.

A stable relationship feels to me like the tires under the seesaw that-cushion-your-ass so it doesn’t break when you hit the ground.

Chris is stable enough in himself to walk all of my territory, and after all this time when I ask what he likes about me, he says, “Well, you’re certainly not boring.”

Thing is, he knows how to take himself home to himself after our walks on my lands.

He’s a horse who knows how to go into the stable, not because it’s an offering of himself to his cage, but because a stable is a comfortable house when the wolves come out at night. And he invites me to follow him in, which I used to resist.

I wanted to explore the night and chase the storms, but eventually, the stable felt way, way more sane than chasing the instability of my own dark. I just look to his light and go home at dusk these days. Not because I have been whipped, but because finally I have been wanted—which is why you can trust it’s safe and sane to expect that there’s someone stable out there who will love you all the way home despite your sense of “instability.”

What you call your “unstable,” there’s a partner out there for you that would call it “you” and love you in all of your places on the seesaw and only intervene when your instabilities just about to bust your ass.

You’re allowed to be all of you in a relationship and be loved in a relationship for all you are.

Though in the beginning, stability might feel destabilizing to our old identity’s ways of relating. Stability of heart and mind and self, in my opinion, comes after finally being willing to receive the love of someone stable…likely for the very first time in our entire lives.

Stability isn’t boring at all. It’s both sides, together. It’s still black and white; it’s only that those modulate across one another and aren’t in opposition.

It might be fair to say life actually gets more creative when one finally disciplines themselves enough to tuck oneself into the stable at night. A good night’s sleep offers many dreams. Those dreams are visited by the same place as our creativity, which, later on, lends itself to the daytime.

A stable relationship isn’t boring.

Neither are you, so stop trying not to be.

Boring isn’t bad either.

Learning to blend with “boring” is a ripening creativity and a recipe for the healthiest relationship with yourself and other you’ve known yet.

~

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