Colette Dowling, LMSW

Willa and I are in the living room. A fire is in the fireplace. It doesn’t keep the house as warm as the old woodstove that my partner and I had for many years. Did I make a mistake in opting for the view of the fire instead of the warmth of the stove?

We are, as usual, discussing "the subject." As usual, Willa cuts to the chase. "Do you ever think about hooking up with someone else?" she asks.

"The idea of living with somebody full time...I guess my immediate reaction is that it’s scary."

"That’s not what you want?"

"I’m not sure that it isn’t what I want, either. I don’t know. What I don’t want is to live full time with somebody the way I did in the past. But maybe there’s a whole other way of living with somebody."

Of course we’ve tiptoed around this subject before. Many times before. More than tiptoed. "If I’m going to have a relationship now," Willa says, with the kind of assertiveness we feel on our better days, "it has to have some real value in my life, not just because ‘everybody has one’, or whatever. It has to add something. Otherwise I’d rather not have one."

What we want is a full life, however that can be made to happen. And we want to dream our dreams, the ones we never dared dream before. If we get married or remarried, we’re afraid we’ll slide back into traditional roles of what a "good wife" is supposed to do. We remind ourselves of this. We try to shore up our grit. "I feel like I have to rely on myself," Willa says. "I can’t rely on some romantic fantasy about some guy, not that I’ve ever allowed any guy to support me. But I still had so much invested emotionally, you know. And really, I feel like it’s up to me now. I have to create my own sense of fulfillment, my own sense of joy and excitement in life."

"What made that happen?" I ask her.

"Maturity," she says. "It’s a maturing process that happens, maybe not to everybody, but it’s happening to me. It’s part, also, of a spiritual search process. We live in a culture that’s always telling us the answer is somewhere outside ourselves. That the answer is in having more money, or a better body, or a better relationship. And I think that that’s not true."

"Do you think that for you, realizing that you no longer have the sexual power you used to have influenced this idea that ‘I can’t get it from outside myself’?"

"That was definitely a big part of it. When I didn’t have it anymore it made me it made me recognize how addicted I’d gotten to that experience. Somehow I had to adjust, I had to let that one go. And it was very interesting to me because in doing that, in letting go, I feel like I’ve also let go of my parents at a deeper level than I ever did before. Somehow it’s all tied up. It’s like my parents are never going to be the Mommy and Daddy that I always wanted them to be. And I’m never going to find my Prince Charming. And I’m going to have to work hard for what I want, and I’m going to have to put up with frustration. And all of these things, honestly, I think up until recently I just didn’t know. A big part of me was operating from the place of a child who somehow thought that Mommy and Daddy were out there, that Prince Charming was out there, that things were just going to happen like magic."

"So the magic is gone now?"

"The illusion, the illusion. I’m letting go of it in my life. Now, when things happen that aren’t necessarily the way I want them to be, it’s easier for me to accept. It’s like I’m more willing to just sort of take things as they come."