The morning after I met my husband at a meditation, the phone rang in my office—it was him, calling to ask me to dinner that night. I couldn’t go, even though I wanted to, due to a previously scheduled date with an everyday coworker, which felt like an appointment compared to the prospect of a passion-filled evening with the new and mysterious Nick.
Miraculously I uttered a response before my heart leaped into my throat. “Tonight I have plans, but how about some other time soon?” After hanging up, a tidal wave of anxiety crashed over me, as I had not only a date that evening, but a plane ticket to visit yet a different man across the country the following weekend, damaged self-esteem from last week’s split with a twenty-three-year-old Adonis fresh out of Princeton, a broken heart over a lover in New York who hadn’t called me back in three days, two missed calls from my Puerto Rican salsa partner, and one voice message from my not yet ex-husband asking me to reconsider the divorce. Any wonder I needed meditation?
Even though I’d spread myself so thin, I still experienced moments when my love life caused me only half the stress that my job did. As the editor of a magazine for addiction counselors, I endured too much (admittedly self-induced) exposure to the concept of “codependency.” Despite its specific clinical meaning, I self-diagnosed myself as codependent simply because I depended on the approval of others, especially men, to feel even just okay about myself. I further justified this label because I was struggling to break free of guilt for leaving my ex, projecting that he “needed” me. Antidepressants and weekly counseling sessions were the only things keeping me going, it seemed.
I needed an intervention—divine intervention. So, on lonely evenings spent in Barnes & Noble aisles waiting for my phone to ring, I started reading spiritual books. Before long I noticed a message that kept on repeating: “Love is a total surrender.” Yet how could it be, when it so sharply contradicted my therapist’s mantra: “Do not lose yourself in a relationship”?
