Some people are a love story and some people are a life story
And both can co-exist in a lifetime
read time: 11 mins
Welcome to this week’s Samanee’s Wonders - a weekly-ish newsletter where I share timeless life lessons in everyday life moments.
If you’re new around here, my goal is simple. To help you notice the small things in your life. To take a step back. And to see that there is joy, beauty, mystery, and magic in our everyday if we just allow ourselves to see them.
This week’s post is around my musings on love.
So let’s get to it!
There's a book idea I've been noodling around with for a little while. I've wanted to title it, "To all my lovers", a series of short stories, notes, and anecdotes of all the little and big loves that have come my way and how they've shaped my view of love.
I've been on close to 500 dates. Been in love 9 times. Had 6 serious relationships. Two live-in relationships. And three people I thought I would marry at a certain point in my life.
Suffice to say, I've experienced a lot in the love and dating realm. Truthfully, I still feel like I'm figuring it out. But I have learned a thing or two.
Growing up, I was never quite modeled healthy love. My grandparents and my parents were in an arranged marriage. And I wouldn't exactly say any of them loved each other. I also wouldn't say they modeled healthy communication, partnership, or coexistence.
It was a great lesson on what not to do. But what do you do?
My only basis for building my understanding of love was Disney fairytales and Gossip Girl...which are not great sources either.
So I'd start to read books and blogs on how to have a healthy relationship. Do things like relationship check-ins. Learn each other's love languages. Don't become too codependent. Talk about your feelings.
It all felt basic.
The only way to figure out this love thing was to dive in head first. And so I dove.
My very first relationship was my high school sweetheart. We dated for 2.5 years, from 10th to 12th grade. What was odd to many of my friends was that as soon as he and I started dating as bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 15 year olds, we both knew we would break up our senior year. It was an explicit pact between us.
"Why even bother dating if you know you're going to eventually break up?" was often the comment we'd get.
I hadn't quite crystalized this thought to myself at the time — maybe because I was so excited to have my very first boyfriend — but I think somewhere deep down, I didn't care if we were going to break up. I saw it as a beautiful opportunity to learn about love.
And he did teach me a lot about it. We were about as opposite as two people could get. I was class Valedictorian. He was barely passing his classes. I was a nerd on the slight outskirts of the popular crew. He was part of the cool soccer jocks who were very much part of the popular crew. I was stone-cold sober. He loved his drinks (he was half Italian) and his joints (which he did end up quitting once we started dating).
Our teachers would even gossip about us, wondering why the hell two completely opposite people were dating. My basketball coach even pulled me aside during class one day and insisted that my boyfriend would be a bad influence on me.
Instead, he loved me. He listened to me on my hard days. He got me through many of my depressive episodes. He would make me laugh more than anyone. He would stop our hours-long phone chats and encourage me to focus on my grades or practice piano. He even got along with my parents (he and my mom would even text)! He showed me two completely different people could still love.
Maybe the most beautiful thing he did for me was remind me that his love was never contingent on my grades, my accolades, or the fact that I captained two varsity sports. He always loved me for me.
But senior year rolled around, and we broke up just as the pact between us dictated.
Our relationship wasn't perfect. I don't think we fully understood how to best love each other (we never understood each other's love languages). We weren't always the best communicators. Sometimes, I cared more about being right than being loving towards him. But I felt like I got the lessons I needed.
Silly 18-year old me thought she was now ready for some adult-level dating and love.
My mother was married at 21. My grandmothers were even younger. This painted a lot of my worldview around dating. Simply put, if you weren't dating with the potential for marriage, what was the point?
You're either sleeping around or you're looking for the one. There was never an in-between. So I kept those lines very clear with anyone I met.
My next love was my college sweetheart. We met during my sophomore year in college while he was a senior. I have this distinct memory of our first date. He was getting out of the car, and I remember this calm feeling of familiarity. It felt like I had known him for a lifetime, and I had a gut feeling that he was the one.
Ours was a hot and heavy love. It was either our second or third date, but he took me to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and he surprised me with the showing of Monet's Water Lillies. Water lilies are my favorite flower and Monet is my favorite artist.
"I couldn't find you water lilies so I thought I'd bring you here instead." My heart swelled up.
And as we got into the car to drive back to Rhode Island, he looked at me, deep into my soul, and said, "Fuck it. Samanee, I love you and I know you love me too." I did.
I remember introducing him to my mother over the phone, and him telling my mom (unprompted) that he was going to marry her daughter. It all felt easy and right. Until it didn't.
My college sweetheart unfortunately was battling severe bouts of depression and anxiety, and it got to the point where our relationship was adding to his mental health stress versus helping. I broke up with him for his own well-being, and it damn near broke me in the process.
It didn't make sense to me. We loved each other. We were loyal. We were committed. We did nothing wrong. And yet it didn't work out.
It took me another year to finally see that while I loved him, I was more in love with the idea of love itself. That I was molding myself to fit into the life he had planned and not go after the dreams I actually wanted. And I would've hated living in Boston.
Following my breakup, I ended up in New York that summer. Still mending my heartbreak, I was emotionally unavailable and physically too available. I was living out my Sex & the City chapter.
Like I mentioned earlier, you either date to marry or you sleep around. And I wasn't ready to date quite yet.
But it was in that state I met my next boyfriend. Unlike my college sweetheart, this was a slow burn.
He was one of many I was "dating". But I found myself falling for him a little more, the more time we spent together in New York. It would take an entire year before I told him I loved him for the first time.
I left the Big Apple after 3 weeks of meeting him to start my gap year adventures. He ended up following me to LA, then to Berlin, visited my family in Bangladesh, and then I ultimately moved in with him in New York.
With him, I was grounded in my love versus floating on cloud 9.
He gave me the type of relationship I didn't know I needed. Empowering, intellectual, easy, passionate, compassionate, fun, and full of laughs. And I thought this, this, was the life story I wanted.
Unfortunately, he ended up being a con man. Turns out, he was married with two kids and expecting a third, and managed to lead a double life between me and his wife for 1.5 years until his wife finally discovered the truth.
She called me out of the blue one day to tell me that I was dating her husband. I thought I knew what heartbreak was after my last one. This was a new level of pain I had never experienced.
Fuck love.
I had grown weary and jaded after my last two relationships. I was struggling to get the point of love when it always left me with a collapsed lung and a hole in my chest.
It was during this time though that I discovered Esther Perel.
For the uninitiated, Esther Perel is a popular therapist known for her work on human relationships. She's written Mating in Captivity and the State of Affairs, two fantastic books I highly recommend on maintaining long-term desire in a relationship and unpacking infidelity.
I started to listen to her on podcasts, and she gave me a soundbite that's painted a lot of my dating views since.
"Some people are a love story, and some people are a life story."
Initially, I was confused. How could you love someone if you didn't intend on spending your entire life with them? Wouldn't that stop you from being in love in the first place?
Or even, why even bother having the love story if it's not for life? It felt like a waste of time.
But as I continued to listen, I continued to become more and more interested.
Love stories can be people who come into your life for a season. Who help heal you. Who teach you something about the world or yourself. Who can show you healthy love. Maybe you fundamentally don't agree on some life stuff (one of you wants kids while the other doesn't. One wants city life while the other wants the suburbs).
But that doesn't mean you can't reap the joy, benefits, and the love of the love story. If anything, your love stories can prime you for an even better life story.
I remember meeting my first love story during my junior year of college. He was a ridiculously handsome post-doc at Stanford. Smart, poetic, kind, loving, beautiful both inside and out.
Our story started off with long letters to each other, sharing our naked minds with each other before our bodies ever met.
I flew to San Francisco for our first date, which was a weekend trip planned to San Diego. And I remember this paradoxical feeling that hit me when we first met.
I felt deeply for this man, but I did not see my life with him.
We had a beautiful weekend together, and I went back to Rhode Island to tell my friends about our date. But I was still processing the paradox that existed in my heart and mind.
"I don't think I've ever loved someone and not want to marry them," I told them. They asked me if I wanted to break up with him. I didn't.
We went on to date for close to a year before he moved to Germany for his next academic assignment. And I can confidently say he was one of the most eye-opening and heart-opening relationships I've ever been in.
He introduced me to non-monogamy in one of the healthiest containers I've ever been in for an open relationship, taught me to own my needs when I was used to suppressing them, showed me what healthy boundaries and communication could look like, let me explore my sexual curiosities without judgment, helped me work through my own jealousies that were rooted in insecurity, modeled what healthy interdependence and coregulation could look like, and showed me how to cook a damn delicious Greek pizza.
He was never going to be a life story, but these are the lessons I still keep with me today.
There's a concept in the dating world known as the relationship escalator. Where once you start dating, you move up the escalator towards moving in, then marriage, then kids and your dog, until death do you part.
But can you have a real relationship without being on the relationship escalator? Logical, monogamous-leaning relationships would dictate no. But as I've explored alternative relationship structures and found myself in many love stories, I'd assert yes.
I went to a talk a year ago where the panelists were a sex therapist, a polyamorous therapist, and a writer from GQ who focuses on love and sex. One of them shared a resource that I've linked here called the non-escalator relationship menu (this is also great for people who do want to enter into an escalator or life story, monogamously or non-monogamously).
It was the first time I saw a practical way to deepen a love story without it needing to go up the escalator toward a life story. I've since used it with many of my lovers.
I've gotten to explore deep intimacy with them, have a consistent and stable source of support, meet some of their friends and family when it made sense, support each other in our personal and professional pursuits, and fall in love with them without ever forcing the issue of marriage and lifelong partnership.
My partners have helped refine my ideas of what love can be. What a relationship can be. Of what I really need (and what is actually more negotiable than I thought). They've held me through heartbreaks. They've helped me negotiate through changing life priorities and life changes. They've kept my standards high. They listen to my own dating woes. They reflect and mirror back what I need to hear without fear or judgment.
If I had only dated for life stories, I would've missed out on all of these growth and learning opportunities. I would've missed out on my own healing. I would've missed out on my expansion and evolution.
A few months ago, I had gotten a vision that I would meet my life story towards the end of the year. But before I would meet him, I would meet someone who would be an epic love story. A healer of sorts. To help melt the ice that had formed around my heart since my last breakup.
I met him 2 weeks after the vision.
And what ensued has been an epic love. Of someone truly seeing me at my core, my depths, my worst, and still finding love for me. Of someone reminding me that I am walking sunshine. Of someone reminding me that my being is worthy of more love than I know what to do with.
And you may be asking, "This love sounds so great. Why wouldn't you want it to be a life story?"
Minus some practical lifestyle differences, deep down, he and I know that's not our story. That's not what we were meant to experience with each other in our lifetime. But we were meant to experience great love. And that's reason enough to be together for this season.
I end this piece with a line that's always stuck with me. It was about two years ago when I was living in Mexico City. My best friend and one of her boyfriends were visiting me at the time.
She is polyamorous, and when she and this boyfriend met, she already had a long-standing partner. He had never done non-monogamy before and had never thought he ever would. But he knew he loved her.
While we were driving to the Teotihuacan pyramids just outside of Mexico City, I asked him why did he enter this relationship with my best friend knowing that she was poly and partnered?
"Love is so rare as it is. I never want to lose an opportunity to love."
Don't lose an opportunity for love in your life because it's not the life story.
The life story will come. I can't wait for mine. Once that person comes into your world, you're going to know. And I truly believe that it's because of all the love stories along the way, that you'll be prepared to receive your epic, loving life story.
To your loving, wandering ways!
See you Friday :)