“In school you get the lesson and then take the test… In life you take the test and then get the lesson.”

-- Unknown Source

I have lived love's romantic illusions. I have fallen in love with people for some unreasonable irrational need to experience it. That magnetic pull, to go through that swampland and come out of it wiser and more aware of the things that appear to drown the soul. The entanglements become the learning ground. Find the illusions and know them well.

Be attentive to the one you choose to see as your paramour and ask yourself, “Is this really the one or is this only a passage, an initiation?”

Is there some need in me that has not completed itself? An unrequited love that this child I was still wants to recreate and make it end happily ever after? The only ‘happily ever after’ I need is the one that enables me to say ... “this one is not real or this one is my unfinished business. This is something I have to complete and learn from, moving on from there.”

Now that I know the terrain, I can differentiate between real and unreal. I can find love to be a solvable mystery that my soul knows to be the plan.

~ Gemma Halpern

“It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.”

-- Anthony Storr

Read Gemma’s complete story.