When You Were Young

Mmmmmmmmmmontana  

When we were young, my man and I, we did not get the love we needed or wanted. We both entered adulthood with what I would call gaping wounds from the developmental trauma we endured. We have varying degrees of awareness about that trauma, and we've sought help with recovering from it to varying degrees as well.

All this adds up to, for us as a couple, a potentially volatile situation where one of our triggers winds up triggering the other one and before we know it there's a full scale battle on our hands and we are on opposite sides.

It's exhausting, and it's happened countless times over the past two years and change since we've been living together. It happened again yesterday, on the road, on the way to pick up my son in Seattle.

When it was over, when we both stopped yelling, switched drivers, and entered a kind of stunned silence, I felt something shift inside me.

"No more" I thought. "I can't do this anymore." Over the next 18 hours or so, this feeling crystallized for me. I wanted to be able to treat my man with love and respect at all times, and I wanted the same from him. I knew we'd proven, with this latest blowout, that this isn't possible for us - even after both individual and couple's therapy. Even with the crazy amount that we dig each other. It just doesn't work.

And so we began the process of deciding how to go about uncoupling. Neither of us had done it this way before - still in love - and we didn't really know how.

Lucky for us, we had another 9 days in the car and a soundtrack that included this choice song to help us figure it out:

You sit there in your heartache
Waitin' on some beautiful boy to
To save you from your old ways
You play forgiveness, watch it now, here he comes

He doesn't look a thing like Jesus
But he, talks like a gentleman
Like you imagined when you were young

Can we climb this mountain? I don't know
Higher now than ever before
I know we can make it if we take it slow
Let's take it easy, easy now, watch it go

We're burnin' down the highway skyline
On the back of a hurricane, that started turnin'
When you were young
When you were young

And sometimes you close your eyes
And see the place where you used to live
When you were young

I know that when we are apart, in September, we will sometimes close our eyes and see the place we used to live together. We aren't particularly young - definitely middle-aged by normal standards, but I sometimes think we are figuratively younger because of how we entered adulthood...