“Intelligence, humor, success…it’s all bullshit Beata.  These are not characteristics.  It’s just power.  And you want him to be powerful only because this will only feed your power.  Everything comes down to power,” Judith tells me.  I thought this was a bit cliche at first.  But, I let these words linger this past month until it ultimately revealed a profound truth about my romantic past.

Since my early twenties, I’ve pegged men as saviors and sought salvation in their hairy warm arms.  I needed them to fill up black pits that for whatever reason I thought I couldn’t do myself.  My last boyfriend, for example, saved me from the previous one. The one before the last saved me to make Aliyah.  My third to last relationship saved me from the mourning of my parents’ divorce…and so on.  I “needed” to hear them say over and over again that everything was going to be all right, to only have this exasperate my pain.

However, each dark episode in my life has ended with renewed vigor.  And once I no longer needed to be saved, the demise of the relationship would near.  When my natural fire would reignite, it shed no new light and energy.  Instead, it evaporated our love.

And with this vicious cycle, it’s no surprise that the greatest lessons on relationships were the ones I learned this past year…SINGLE!  For almost 9 months, I lost all desire to date men, which was life’s way of forcing me to just hang out with my anxiety and internal displacement.  I had no choice but to learn how to lick my own wounds, replenish the emptiness, and tell myself (convincingly), “Beata, it’s going to be all right!  No actually, it’s going to be fu**** amazing!”

But here’s the greatest lesson of all: chose men from a position of strength.  In this journey, I found my feminine and masculine.  I learned to “complete” myself.  And I’ve become my own savior.  What I really need from him is to possess the kind of power that will not just carry me through when weakened, but to propel me in this life when I’m at my most powerful.

The start of the new year has also brought a closure to this epic period of my young adult life.  The noise has subsided, and I feel an exhilarating calm before another great storm.  This time, love will find me at the peak of a mountain, with miles of earth beneath me.  I’ll be ready to embrace his force, and I only hope for him, he’ll be ready to embrace mine.