Getting Your “Combo Pack” in This Life

Essay 18 of 18

My heart empathizes with you deeply because I had another brotha tell me about his bad breakup. He said,

“Yeah, people are always talking about how the universe is all about making sure you have the lessons; look, these lessons are getting expensive, and I’m tired.”

I bring that up because I know you’ve dealt with a lot in relationships over the decades. So, as a result, I’m stuck between two very profound feelings about your situation.

The first feeling is, you know how you and I are; we trade crazy language for stuff when it comes, since you’ve gone through this experience, I feel like life wanted just to give you a complete upgrade. Just to upgrade your expectation for what kind of relationship you truly deserve, to get you at a higher plateau. To get you up where you belong is my first kind of feeling on the one hand.

Knowing that you’ve lived through some profound disappointments over several decades capped off with this latest one, my second profound feeling is, “Ooh, that’s a weighty lesson.” I’m stuck between those two feelings.

On the one hand, I love the idea of you setting the intention to find, and this is just me being me, your “Combo Pack Woman” in this life. On the other hand, however, I am hoping you could slow down talking about how that might happen. It is presumptuous for any person to say that they know how opportunities will strike.

Here is my point, I think you actually should figure out what works for you relationally and what is in a “combo pack” of your ideal partner. Absolutely, paint a picture of what you need in a relationship, you have an intention and a desire to have them, but you can’t really control the process of how this person is going to come to you.

I also want you to consider the pain Tema caused you, not just the pleasure, because that’s also important here. So, in other words, let’s turn down the volume a little bit on the idealization about Tema too. And let also say and own, ‘Huh, I’m a man of a certain age and some elements in how she ended things went down; No!’

And other things too, like dude, I’m still riveted by the impact of the generational, cultural differences. I said for myself, “Absolutely not; let me stay up in the stratosphere with people closer to me.” The challenges related to the generational/developmental and cultural difference between you and Tema, which you described beautifully and in detail as the through-line across those 16 different voice notes/casts, were real.

Listening to the through-line of generations and culture gave me pause. It began to get clearer the more I heard. In the sense of, maybe not so much age, but developmental “stage” is something to pay rapt attention to fully. In other words, what I’m trying to say is you permitted yourself to suspend your usual sense of judgment and anxiety about these differences while you were in the relationship.

But given the outcome you had, while those generational and cultural differences didn’t have to be deal killers, they were indeed something that needed attention paid. Because those two things and the underlying things that make them up that you covered in your 16 voice notes/casts affected you both in different ways; that’s all I’m saying. So you need to gather all of the lessons, the beautiful ones, and the painful ones. And see how that reshuffles your deck a little bit.

I wonder if life (the universe) brought Tema into your life as a disruptor to shake things up for you. Because she disrupted on the front end by getting you to open up your heart again, after four or five years, and she disrupted on the back end by the clumsy way she ended things.

I wonder if the disruption was about life saying to you,

‘Oh, no; you are selling yourself short; we have so much more for you.’

So, Tema coming into your life was simply an alarm clock and after 40+ years of relationships, you’re awake now. Good morning!

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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