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“There’s always that hunger for something more, a curiosity. It’s just a dangerous distraction.”

I talked earlier today with a dear friend about what it means to feel something deep for someone that you’re not married to. He felt that type of affection, the stuff that gets us humming, the kind of affection that puts a fire under our asses and makes us extra excited about life — should be cut off, uprooted.

I looked at him and felt a knot in my stomach. He was telling me that I must take all of my most precious things, the things that make me, me — my heart, my soul — and pack them up and hide them away.

That is what it takes to hold back love. We end up divorcing ourselves from the very things that make us beautiful and lovable, like our vulnerability, our desire, our joy, our spark.

Akin to cutting out a chunk of our hearts, then wondering why we don’t feel like ourselves. When we decide we are not allowed to love someone, something goes numb. When we want to wake up and love someone else, it doesn’t come so easily because we’ve already dimmed the love light. When we turn it off someplace, it gets dark elsewhere too. That’s just the nature of love.

How often do we do that to ourselves when we grow up, settle down? Rip beautiful things from our skin and hearts, like memories, words, thoughts, music, laughter? Think that we’re better off not knowing the people that shaped us? The ones that breathe life into the parts of us we forget existed?

Don’t get me wrong, nothing can take me away from my husband. He balances me out, holds on tight during the wildest rides, makes it hard for me to take care of him when he’s sick because he would rather ask me about my day. Tonight he put his head in my lap and looked at me with deep longing. He said, “You are the most important thing in my life. I need you.”

I live terrified and in peace on a daily basis because this sort of love is not something I have ever known. It literally heals all the cracks more so than anything else I’ve tried. There is nothing quite like having this dedicated partner, who gets tears in his eyes when I’m in the urgent care with a kidney infection.

Yes, my husband is that dude who wakes up smiling at me everyday. He makes out with me in grocery stores. He backs up my dreams, even when they don’t make much sense to his computer engineer brain. When we make love, I can barely move, so satisfied that I’m rendered useless for a few hours after. Most importantly, he can laugh with me, anytime, anywhere, shares my dirty sense of humor, and does impressions that make me pee my pants.

I get it.

I have it really really really good.

I would never do a thing to jeopardize this. This is why I come to him and tell him everything. I tell him who I have loved, who I still love, and why and for what. I let him into all the parts of me that I try to hide in polite company. Not to hurt him, but to let him in completely, knowing that nothing quite separates us more so than lies or denial.

When you dedicate your life to someone, you promise to hold this one person in high esteem above all else. You decide that no one else fits your heart quite like they can, and you build your life around this truth. The stuff that threatens the life of your relationships, like pain, suffering, even loving someone else, only brings you closer together.

How does that happen, you ask? How in the world could loving other people make a sacred lifelong union even better, deeper, juicier?

Well, it doesn’t, at first. At first it shakes us up, has us unsettled and awake in the middle of the night.

This is because our lizard brain wants us to believe that love equals sex. That if we love someone, we must want them, and if we want them, we could actually lose control and do something about it. As if the desire in itself can threaten a powerful bond between beloveds.

But it can’t. Not when you’re really honest about it.

It takes guts to be honest about this messy feeling stuff. Recently my husband re-connected with one of the loves of his life. He sat on the phone with her after years of forced silence, laughed, told her about his life. He glowed with a type of glow that I know only this woman can unleash. I never felt more happy for him. This is what a sacred love does: it frees us up so we don’t carry resentments and fears anymore.

It allows back into our hearts the precious few whom we have been so blessed to know.

And it’s okay to have feelings for these people, to have desires. One person can’t meet every need. No matter how perfect, wonderful, soul-satisfying your partnership is, someone else will always get some part of you better.

We get into trouble when we act on the feelings, the desires, thinking that somehow it will be better than the relationship we spend hours upon hours building brick by brick. The relationship with the person who makes delicious love to you even if your legs are hairy, or you keep changing the subject to what to make for dinner.

But don’t feel too bad when you entertain the idea of being with someone else. We are just not taught how to hold our attractions, our love, how to talk about it or what to do with it.

It’s not our fault. From the beginning of time, sex, passion and desire have been given a bad rep.  The Puritans stripped themselves of passion, believing it somehow squeezed the God right out. We hear about politicians, church leaders, gurus, all getting carried away with their desires which only ends in terrible heartache.

That is why, what I’m about to tell you is incredibly radical. It is so pure in a world that says love and attraction are dangerous traps.

Have you ever seen two children play together? One offers the other a half of his peanut butter sandwich, and then the other child returns the gift with a kiss on the cheek. Both smile, look down, faces get red. It is one of the most precious things we can ever witness.

There is no shame there, there is no fear. There is no having to define it, worry about it, obsess about it. There is no running away. There is no demand for more. Children can love each other because no one has yet to tell them they shouldn’t. They can’t help but see each other with big adoring eyes, because there’s no other way to be. Nothing has happened which tells them it’s not safe to love so completely.

They hold hands, then go play catch, giggling and fully alive in their precious bodies the entire time.

Be that. Be just like that. Be children with each other, kiss, hold hands, bring each other sandwiches, knowing the whole time that true love can never endanger you, it can only bring you greater joy.

“Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Heaven is everywhere, especially in between you and the love(s) of your life.