Yesterday, I met up with an ex. We were involved with each other for almost 4 years, and it had been a year since we has last seen each other… an emotional ride, for sure.

Here are some things that I’ve known about how I experience reality and love, but through our interaction yesterday, I’m feeling these points more deep in my nerve endings than I ever have. I’m sharing these, because… why not, and maybe also I’m wondering if others feel similarly.

* You never stop loving someone. You just learn to love them differently. (And there is other love just as meaningful as the romantic/sexual kind.)

* Some things about people never change (both the big things and the small things). Some things do change. Love — to me — is about learning to love people as wholes, including and maybe even particularly the stuff that you may not be able to stand at first and that may very well never change (for it is through love that we can start to see another person’s reality); love is also about learning to love another person’s journey for the things that very well may change.

* And at the end of the day, there really is only so much we can do to help/encourage/change others. The people we love will make the journey that they choose, for better or for worse, and whatever they choose, that is ok — for we love them. The people we love will make their own journey and find happiness on their own — so let them, and listen, and support. It’s all you can do. Anything more can be unhealthy.

* The deepest happiness — and the method in life to feeling more fulfilled, deeper and more often — comes from being happy and secure in oneself, yes, but also learning to find constant happiness in the happiness of others, even as that happiness and fulfillment may be independent from you, this concept of compersion.

During our relationship, my ex wasn’t happy. She couldn’t be happy with me, and she just wasn’t happy in general. But in the last year, she’s been on a journey and found a life for herself where — for the first time in her life — she has found happiness and fulfillment. When we were talking, she had this brightness in her eyes that I had never seen, and over the last year she’s discovered so much about herself and her feelings about life and the world. She’d done so much, and she had found people and things that could bring her the happiness I never could provide her.

As she was telling me this, I started crying tears of joy, and even today I’m still high off the knowledge that she is doing so well and feeling so fulfilled.

And to me, that’s true love, even if it is no longer the romantic/sexual kind. By learning to love her as a whole, believing in her journey, and getting out of her way — in a selfish way, I can feel full from her fulfillment too.

Wow, what magic that love is.