Learning to Love
In which Teófilo speaks briefly about learning to love, healing, and challenges to his and Mercie's love for one another.
I know your eyes in the morning sun
I feel you touch me in the pouring rain
And the moment that you wander far from me
I wanna feel you in my arms again
And you come to me on a summer breeze
Keep me warm in your love, then you softly leave
And it's me you need to show
How deep is your love
How deep is your love, how deep is your love
I really mean to learn
'Cause we're living in a world of fools
Breaking us down when they all should let us be
We belong to you and me…
~ Maurice Ernest Gibb, Robin Hugh Gibb, Barry Alan Gibb, “How deep is your love.”
God was healing me.
The reader would do well to recall my previous evaluation of my own psychological state up to this point. My father's absence from my life resulted in my fractured personality. A father's job is to congeal his children's sense of selves as independent personalities. Mom worsened my fragmentation by destroying the moral sway my paternal proxies had on me. As we have seen, she had succeeded in turning me against Papi for a while. She kept me from any friendships with men that could turn these men into proxy fathers to me.
Despite my deficiencies, my renewed religious faith led to a strong but progressive healing of my inmost self. God the Father took the place of a father in my life. It was God himself who began directing my slow, difficult, and lifelong healing. He was to cement my fractured, adolescent personality into a coherent, adult whole. By the time Mercie and I got together the principal part of my healing had taken place already. I know this because I never loved her as an object, as a means to some other end. I was able to love her as an end in herself, and to receive her love in like manner.
Mercie was a whole, seamless person - unlike me.
Mercie wasn't as estranged from her own father as I was with mine. Don Roberto was gruff and prone to anger. He was grudging, and defensive due to his life's decisions and their outcomes. He was very self-centered. To his credit, he was always present in my Mercie's early life.
As a consequence, and also thanks to Madma, Mercie's personality lacked the cracks mine had. Even then she exemplified the ISFJ type in the Myers-Briggs Personality scheme. Often referred to as defenders and nurturers, persons with Mercie’s type:
...thrum with passionate commitment and loyalty toward the people they love. At times, Defenders themselves may be surprised by the intensity of their feelings, especially their fierce desire to protect and care for their partner. (Source)
As it's often the case with persons of this type, Mercie had her eyes set on a nursing career.
Of course, back then I knew nothing about personality typing. Yet, I can attest to my Mercie's display of ISFJ characteristics back them. Hers was (and remains) a complete, whole, healthy, high-functioning personality. Most important of all, her heart too, was also open to give and to receive love.
She began to nurture me, and to help me heal me by helping me erect appropriate psychological boundaries.
The Great Rearrangement
Adapting ourselves to each other was easy. At least, I like to think so. Our similar backgrounds and experiences of unconventional family structures bound us together. We lacked the obstacles older couples often find when meshing with each other. We connected to each other as two pieces of a puzzle. It's not that we didn't have occasional disagreements and arguments. At times we didn’t see eye-to-eye and that was - and is - normal. It's that we had the implicit agreement to hold no conflict unsolvable. No disagreement would lead to our separation. With that fear allayed, our quarrels, when they took place, always found resolution.
After we established our love over a firm foundation of commitment, we began the arduous process of re-relating to others. We became aware right away that we would be each other’s first and principal priority. We began by reeducating our friends, as well as our parental and authority figures. We strived to show that our commitment to each another was firm, serious, and permanent. We had to teach the people who once enjoyed a privileged place in our lives that their place had changed. We also had to establish and repeat the fact that we might not live to their expectations as we had our own to live up to.
We’d also placed our relationship in Jesus’ care, but how did that look like in practice? It would be unfair to say that we had no one to teach us. We both had a moral foundation given to us by church and educators. But when it came to love at such a young age, our guiding maxims consisted of stern taboos and a constant remonstrance against the dangers of illicit, “dirty” sex. Sex was bad except in marriage, when as if by magic it turned good. There was no bridging the two realities except by prohibition. St. John Paul II hadn’t formulated his Theology of the Body yet. The Church was still learning how to talk about sex and love in a positive, nurturing manner to dating couples. As with the absent manual of adulting I mused about before, we had to come up with the practical rules of the game ourselves, rules we derived from our formation but aimed at sustaining always our mutual love.
We were to face our own trials and errors but I’m happy to report that here we are, still going on strong, still together over 40 years later.
Anyway, reeducating others was a chore and pursuing the primacy of our relationship had different outcomes for various people, as we'll see.
Me encanta la manera en que presentas tu adolescencia junto a tú novia🙋🏻♀️♥️