5 minute read
Independently Ever After Tara Wesson
INDEPENDENTLY EVER AFTER
Tara Wesson @tarywess
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The dating world is rife with barbs and broken hearts. Tara Wesson tells how to make gold from it, and put the most important thing first: you.
That young girls are taught to rely on their ‘prince’ from an early age is nothing new. The damsel in distress tale is woven into our infantile brains, with Disney and romcoms, which, once you’re old enough to date, simply turn into the disillusionment of a real ‘need’ for that special someone.
This was me. At twenty one, I’d never had a boyfriend, let alone a requited love. In its place I had a mangled history of emotions and rejections, violations and fledgling broken hearts, leaving me with a pit in my stomach and lump in my throat
whenever I thought about my dating life. By this age I’d strongly solidified a base of feminist values and girlpower vibes, which I knew to be true.. but however proudly I flew my burning bra, the cultural conditioning of codependency ran deep. I remember the vapid rush of serotonin I’d get, whenever a guy would send a heart emoji or an ‘x’. I hated to admit it, but I was absolutely desperate for the slightest glimmer of codependency. I was an aching desert of feelings, too exhausted from the dating scene to be upset, yet clinging too hard to my last sliver of hope to be completely hopeless. I was sick of having nobody as a daily sounding board. Nobody who cared enough to ask about my day and its tiny, trivial details.
Anyone single and silently yearning for a relationship
will tell you the same thing; your heart holds out, but somewhere along the line, it hurts too much to admit to yourself out loud that you want what you want. I was, frankly, feeling sorry for myself, which I’m sure is how this now reads, but it is difficult to detach myself from the heaviness of that period. I was starting to wonder whether
maybe it was me. Maybe I was fundamentally unlovable.
It was December 2018 that this all changed. I was fresh off another ‘I’m not looking for anything serious’ conversation. Going to a music festival over New Year’s, I was ready to dance and sweat and drink away the sluggishness of my dating life, opting for a ‘fuck it’ approach to the whole thing, focusing on myself instead. I shed my tired skin and was ready to birth the new year year with, you guessed it, a new me. It was at this festival that I met the love of my life. And a new me in fact did begin to emerge.
He was easy to talk to. He radiated his signature pure, sparking energy; bright and warm and sharp all at once. From the beginning, my guard was down completely with him. For once, I wasn’t thinking about romance, or how I was coming across… I was simply enjoying every little world that opened up with each conversation. We drew closer and closer with each one, slowly but surely. He’d later tell me he thought I was shy, that I couldn’t hold my own. I like to think he was drawn to my internal fire with no pretences, without the smoke and mirrors I was so used to throwing up. We connected instantly.
It started with us walking a few paces ahead of the group, engrossed in our own talks. Over the course of the festival, I grew to quietly wish he’d come with me everywhere. We explored and napped in the sun by day, and we danced together by night. I remember the first time, on the second night of the festival, when he placed his hand on the small of my back.
He kissed me the following night, when I was dancing in the mosh with a shimmering cape, sweaty and sprayed with water. I was surprised. A love story straight from the
movies soon followed. I swear, you could have written a film script about the two of us. We were supercharged by the heat of the summer and fell quickly, me first, those three words falling from my mouth when I’d had one too many drinks to hold them in any longer. Over sea cliffs and with a bottle of champagne weeks later, he said it back.
One year on from our first meeting, my relationship continues to be the one I’ve always dreamed of. He is everything I’ve ever wanted; the sum total of all my dreams and yearnings and fantasies. He is everything I told myself I didn’t want, just to make the loneliness hurt less.
I used to think I wanted codependency. In my heart of hearts, I thought I wanted someone to make me ‘whole’. I wanted to be rescued, fixed, my life made sense of with the addition of another person. And I can now say that my relationship is everything but codependent. He does not complete me, and he has not rescued me. He has healed me, yes, and he helps me make sense of myself and the world around me at times, but we are not codependent. That is what I love most about our relationship. I try on his way of seeing things, testing out his thoughts and opinions, adopting some and discarding others. He, and every other person in my life, is a lens through which I can look at the world. We are two people, bettering ourselves alongside one another day by day.
16 I do not need the love of my life. I want him and love him. Immensely. And it’s this utter lack of codependency and need that makes my love the exact opposite of, and the exact thing, I’ve been dreaming of all this time. the crux of the matter is this: whether I’ve been single and bitter or happy and in love, it’s always been me. Just like it’s always been you.
