V-J Day
“I was lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. Looking for love in too many faces…Searching your eyes, looking for traces of what.. I’m dreaming of…”
Ok now! Everybody join in, because I KNOW that I’m not the only one who is guilty of living these lyrics. It’s Valentine’s Day, so it’s almost a given that I have to say something about love in the Bipolar universe. Those lyrics have dominated my life since I hit puberty. Now, I’m 41 years old and I’ve got a sexual addiction, but I’ve made a faith choice to remain celibate until marriage. Uh…? Aren’t there some statistics out there somewhere, that say I have more chances of being struck by lightning while using my cell phone in the shower than I do of getting married? Should I keep singing the lyrics hoping Mr. Right will hear me and come a knockin’?
My last relationship (which I mention in the book) imploded so badly it made the Titanic look like a pleasure cruise. My other attempts to find Mr. Right didn’t end much better….so I’m not going to step out and try to have any sage advice to the lovelorn on Valentine’s Day. For most of my Christian walk I’ve whipped myself up into a fine Bipolar frenzy convincing myself that nobody could love such a train wreck like me. A mental illness AND a sexual addiction? What Christian guy with half a brain would settle for that?
Believing that I’d be alone and loveless created a lot of mental instability in me. It didn’t seem enough that Jesus loved me. Jesus loves everybody. Besides, what good were the arms of the Lord when it was real human fleshly arms that I wanted to feel around me? My last relationship was a turning point in my walk with God. I crashed and burned, hitting bottom with such force that it nearly caused my back teeth to crash through my forehead. Ok, maybe not, but the resulting pain and devastation that might have lasted a year in the real world lasted five years in Bipolar World.
But now that I’m on the other side of all of that… everything looks different to me. I don’t go into all the gory details of the relationship or the fallout overly much in the book because I still don’t have enough distance from it all. I still can’t believe that I made such phenomenally bad choices in my search for love or that I believed for even a minute that the love of a man could ever compete with the love of Jesus. Now don’t get me wrong. I still want to marry and be loved. But that desire no longer owns me. Being owned by our desires is a sure route to destruction and misery.
In the absence of a love relationship with a real Christian man, I am finally happy. I didn’t think I could be happy being single with no prospects on the horizons, but I am. This Valentine’s Day it is enough to know that I love Jesus and he loves me (hence the V-J Day). And I’d like to think that if I can find happiness as a single, other neurotic women can too.
The Adventures of Bipolar Girl: Comfort for the Neurotic in All of Us.
