When I was younger, I met this guy at a coffee shop. We’ll call him M. After several months, M confessed that he was madly in love with me, and upon hearing this, I was immediately swept off my feet. Not because I too was in love with him, mind you, but because I was so flattered that I simply couldn’t say no. I mean, how cool is that when someone is madly in love with you!?

I went from zero to I love you too in a matter of weeks. I was on fire. I didn’t stop to breathe or question my own attraction to this guy. I simply moved forward. Within two months, we moved in together, we got a joint bank account, we even bought a dog.

When I stopped to catch my breath, one afternoon when M was not around, I noticed something. I had broken out in hives. My body was covered with bright pink dots. I didn’t think much of it, and kept moving forward in my great new life, with my wonderful boyfriend. Adelate! We decided to move to Sedona to be closer to his family.

Soon after a discussion about buying a house,  living in the desert and hiking our lives away in wedded bliss (c’mon, who wouldn’t absolutely love that?!), I started having horrible stomach pains every day, and insomnia at night. Every time we had sex I would get an infection. And, the hives were back. My body became a vessel of physical exhaustion and my brain started to feel rundown and ragged.

At the same time, I (inevitably, as we all do) started to crash from the love high I was on. As I descended, the stark reality was no where near where I thought I had been. It was, in fact, alarmingly opposite the fantasy-thinking world that I clearly had created. When I opened my eyes–and I mean, really opened them–I didn’t exactly like what I saw. I wasn’t as physically attracted to M as I initially thought. It bugged the hell out of me that he analyzed me so much. And worse, he told me we would have to postpone living in Spain (a dream of mine), until after he got his business off the ground. In fact, he said, he didn’t see Europe in our future at all, why with the three kids we would have.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

These little pink hives shone like beacons of light, warning me that I was not living my right life. When I didn’t listen to them, my stomach jumped into the fray. With coiled and spasmed intestines practically screaming, “Hey, dumbass?!” I did what I always did best. I gulped down gobs of Maalox and shut it all out. Ignore, ignore ignore.

So goes the story of the love addict who, yet again, lived a romantic life that was not right for her. The whirlwind mess of decisions I would make in my 20’s (and my 30’s!) was indicative of a little personality quirk known as self-avoidance, an extraordinarily remarkable coping devise that works like a charm when you’re a kid trying to shut out your parents’ mess ups. But it’s a useless parlour trick in adulthood, especially when it’s your own reality, pain and suffering that you’re trying to avoid.

I told M one afternoon that I needed to think. I spent the day with my three best girlfriends, my group of homegirls that I had practically abandoned since M and I got together. I was gone a while. He sensed something and called me incessantly. The more he called, the more overwhelmed and powerless I felt. The more closed-in I felt. I distinctly remember visualizing a flame inside me, growing smaller and smaller, leaving me colder and weaker. When I returned home to M that night we talked. Our whole lives would be changed if we split up. All our future plans would evaporate. He would be heartbroken. His original confession, I love you madly, haunted me. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to give all this up.

But, the flame inside me. It was almost out. I could no longer avoid the screams from my body simply so that my head and my heart could continue down the road to la la land where everything was just fine. More than anything I knew that if I wasn’t true to myself, M too would be a casualty of my self-avoidance.

I don’t think this is what I want, I said. And, within that one sentence, I ignited the fire inside me and burned our relationship to the ground. My stomach untwisted. My hives vanished…

OK, so it didn’t happen that quickly, but, you get the point. And we both went through a lot of pain for months afterwards. We lost friends, connections, he had to find a new coffee shop. For nearly a year, maybe longer, I questioned if I had made the right decision. Living our right life is not always what we think it is. Sometimes, our right life is not the one we we want, or the one right in front of us, that we have easy access to. Our right life is sometimes buried inside of us, like a seed, only able to bloom after the sunlight and water of a wrong life wakes us up.