"You need to know when someone is meant to be there for a season and when someone is meant to be there for a year." That simple statement is the best and worst advice I have ever gotten.
I feel like anymore I have put too many expectations on love. After all, it is all I have been able to talk about for a while. The more I analyze love in my life, the more I question it. I begin to look for little signs in people that they might be the one, and they either fall short or sweep me off my feet. Either way, I wonder if I'm getting their roles in my life right.
There is a difference between someone who is meant to be there for a season and someone who is meant to be there for a lifetime, and anymore I have begun to notice myself getting them painfully confused. In a season, the person teaches you something you either didn't know about the world or you didn't know about yourself. You are changed in a great way. It may even be years of little things that change who you are. All these little things will come to an end, and expectations meant to last a lifetime are too much. You have changed in the season, and that is all that was meant for you.
However, a relationship for a lifetime is one that continues to change you in many ways. For years you continue to grow and learn about the world and yourself. That person is not going anywhere in your life because they are not meant to.
How do we tell when a season is just a season? Is there a way to tell if it is meant for a lifetime, or we are trying to make it last too long?
In a season, we learn something new. We don't learn new things. We learn something. However, when all these little pieces begin to build up at times to create this one moment of learning, it's easy to think we are changing in many ways. How can we tell the difference between a change that will last a lifetime and a relationship that will last a lifetime?
People have been feeding me lists of information about true love. They tell me that you'll know when you experience certain situations together and you experience these little signs. Everything they said was situational. Everything they said told me that what you feel was dependent on the moment- a little piece of time, which is much like a season. Were they right, or am I seeing mistakes in relationships as a whole?
Every now and then I begin to question my "gut reasoning." I tend to rely on instincts more than knowledge. I don't notice that a guy helping me clean could mean he will be an equal partner later in life, which is a clue many women tell me to look for. I don't think about a guy being a good father because he has the ability to take care of a pet. I know in ways that people doubt. In the end, if I still get butterflies in my stomach when they call or put their arms around me and I blush just hearing their name that they mean something to me. I know that they will always mean something to me, even if it only lasts for a season. I think that's more than a checklist.
Maybe I'll never be able to crack the code and figure out how long someone will last in my life physically, but I know that even just for a season I have built a lifelong connection. I wonder if seasons vs. years is advice I shouldn't listen to, or if it's just advice I'm not willing to listen to. Only my love life will be able to paint an answer.
