Love #2: Are You My Soulmate? FB Message to a Dear Friend in Australia

"When souls electrically connect via the heart, time and space does not hinder communication." - Unknown*

3/22/2020

Hey! I know this is "so random" (Ja'mie), but I had a thought the other day that I wanted to go ahead and share lest I forget it before the next time we chat over Zoom.

I was doing a loving kindness meditation this morning - can't remember how much we've talked about this or how much you know about it. Basically, you envision different sets of people - a friend, a neutral person, a difficult person, all beings everywhere - and offer them phrases of loving kindness: may you be safe; be happy; be healthy; live with ease (or as in my Sassy Gay Buddhist post that you quoted in your recent letter to me, "May you be safe, happy, and less of a bitch!" 😂). Oftentimes, you don't really feel a strong emotion, and that's OK - you're just trying to train your mind to think differently rather than default to reacting with anxiety, self-doubt, judgment, or whatever other unhelpful ingrained mental patterns we all tend to have.

Usually I have to work to feel much emotion during the practice - sometimes I imagine the person doing things in their life that make them happy, or imagine them suffering and feel compassion for them (I once joked to a teacher, “I’m having trouble connecting to a felt sense of the other person’s suffering. Should I just imagine them suffering in as many ways as possible?” 😂). However, I've noticed recently when I decided to focus the well-wishes on a guy I liked that I immediately had a swelling, warm feeling in my heart/chest, and I was like, "Wtf, how come it's so easy to feel this strong feeling for this person who doesn’t even like me back, but it's so hard to feel anything for friends and family?" (I have an answer to that question, but it's coming later).

Me trying really hard to feel something during loving-kindness meditation. Picture via https://aboutmeditation.com/why-is-meditation-so-hard/

This morning, for whatever reason, you popped into my head when the meditation teacher said, "Think of a benefactor, the first person that comes to mind - someone who has lifted you up when you were down." Lo and behold, when your image appeared in my mind’s eye, I was immediately filled with a strong feeling of expansion and warmth in my chest, similar to when I think about guys I'm attracted to, without the sexual or romantic desires, of course (still gay AF, don’t worry 😉).

It made me think of the time I apologized for spending so much time on hookup apps while I was visiting you in Australia last year. I still remember your response: that you didn't mind me spending time on the apps, because your secret ploy to get me to move there was for me to fall in love with someone during my visit so that I'd be forced to come back permanently. I know that was mostly a joke, but ever since then I've wanted to respond and make sure you know that I value my friendship with you as much - probably more - than romantic relationships. I really do cherish our friendship and connection, and even though we say it practically every time we end out Zoom calls (we are quite full of ourselves when it comes to how great our relationship is, aren't we? 😂), I find that you make me feel seen and understood in a way that few other people really can (as we've discussed before - like our souls were directly connected by a pipeline or something 😛 even though neither of us really believes in souls). I think we've discussed this before, but I'm honestly not sure I'll ever find a man who can love me sexually and also understand me with the comprehensiveness and subtlety that you do. I mean, our first conversation in that trashy college bar involved finishing each other’s sentences about phenomenology in Proust, for God’s sake!

It makes me think of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet (which, coincidentally, is another book I convinced you to read) and its beautiful, poignant exploration of the idea that sometimes a friendship can be the most intense relationship of our lives. It also makes me think of the book I was reading on polyamory and non-traditional relationship models, The Ethical Slut, and how the authors pointed out all the ways our expectations of what relationships should look like are very specific, societally constructed, and definitely not the only options available. I think it's dumb that society has taught us that romantic relationships are the only ones that can be truly meaningful, or that we should move across the world for sex-love but not for friend-love. DUMB!!! says my inner Sassy Gay Buddhist. I may not have met a man during my trip in Australia, but there's already a love there strong enough to make me fly around the world for a visit and genuinely consider moving ❤️

Bringing it back to meditation, one thing that Buddhism has helped me understand is that romantic love seems so much more immediate and exciting than friendly love simply because we train our minds to think of it that way! While obsessing about my current crush on a walk, and then exasperatedly wondering why romantic love always feels so much more engrossing to me than other, more nourishing, kinds of love, my inner Sassy Gay Buddhist suddenly spoke up and said, "Bitch, just look at what you're doing now - obsessively thinking about a guy. How often do you go for a walk and reflect on your friends and how much you appreciate them? If you did more of that, eventually you could probably turn the tide and train your mind-body to feel those relationships more concretely."

This is something I knew intellectually, but I hadn't really experienced it in my body. I mean, this is literally what you're doing in loving-kindness: forcing your mind to spend a lot of time thinking about people in a loving way. But as I said before, when I'm practicing loving kindness, the glimmer I feel for friends and family is still so faint compared to the terrifying wildfire that arises every time I envision my crushes. It’s easy for me to get discouraged and doubt whether my inner wisdom is really true: maybe romantic love really is better, maybe it does still have some magical power that will ultimately validate me and solve all my problems and make everything better. Maybe, as great as they seem, friendships really are second-rate, supporting-actor relationships, as so much media wants us to believe.

Which is why, when I felt the bonfire immediately upon envisioning your face, even though I had never thought of you during a loving-kindness practice before (i.e. the feelings arose without me having to stoke or train them), I knew something special had happened, and I knew I wanted to tell you about it. It was beautiful and a bit terrifying, being in the presence of a feeling like that, so powerful you can't fully comprehend it. But it was also deeply reassuring, like a beacon telling me, “Yes, you were right that romantic love is not the only one that can light up your heart! Yes, you are headed in the right direction and should keep going!”

So I guess, in conclusion, I just want to say thank you for your friendship that brings so much light and joy to my life and is also a light for me on my path of meditation and personal growth. You always make me feel loved, cared for, seen, and understood, for which I am humbly and deeply and truly grateful ❤️

* Please tell me if you know where this comes from! It's the quote from the first picture, but when you Google the quote, all that comes up is the picture itself, with no attributions.