Emotional Maturity: What's Love Got to Do with It?
If you have been following me for a while, you know my dear friend, Grace Andrews, the Empath Accelerator co-founder; we talk all things spirituality on Clubhouse every Friday at 8:30 pm EST. Last week on the cusp of Valentine's Day, she wrote a blog post: What's Love Got to Do With It? Catchy title, right?
But honestly, the depth of what she wrote about being single at 34 and never truly having a significant romantic relationship is what many women are facing. Black women seem to struggle with different facets of love than their counterparts of other racial makeup.
Grace's story is one that I have heard before, and I certainly sympathize with being alone and wanting to have a meaningful partnership. I mean, I empathize in every sense of the word. I have been there, and it can be challenging. With time and much more experience than I had at 33, I realize that we always make attracting love hard.
Now, if you are where Grace sits in this right now, you are probably on the cusp of leaving this conversation, and in doing so, you will represent the majority. Many of the women that I meet and work with within my practice seek love. That's part of the draw to the spiritual journey, the dissatisfaction they feel in their lives. It is a clear sign of awakening. It was the very same thing I experienced right before really taking a serious look at myself and moving forward with spiritual guidance. I left that whole story on the podcast. It's a story that people dismiss because they see me now and know that I am married and have a family. Though looking back, the road to getting here was long.
Before meeting my husband at 33, I can say that I had never had a healthy relationship. I didn't know anything about a healthy exchange. The example of a partnership that I had witnessed growing up was filled with chaos, arguments, lack, and two people existing with each other in duty until they were tired of that and separated. As a teenager, I never got a green light to date openly. It was something that I felt I had to do in silence. My parents never met any boyfriends that I had in high school, and as a result, I had no clue what I was doing, what to look for, or how to show up or attract anything that looked healthy. I, like many others, had never had a tangible example of emotional evolution.
So if you find yourself in the same situation, my advice to you right now is to ask yourself this question: who taught you what you believe to be real about relationships? And, what did they teach you?
What is Emotional Maturity?
If I had to write down a list of beliefs I had about relationships when I left home as a teenager, or even at age 25, it would be clear that my level of emotional maturity was nonexistent when it came to a romantic relationship. Obviously, I was not ready to be in a relationship with anyone because, at that time, I had extremely limiting beliefs, and I had no real connection to myself --this is emotional immaturity. Emotional immaturity is the absence of grounding and is a state of selfishness due to the being making a conscious decision to remain ignorant to the soul's condition. And this dismisses the natural order of growth as the being advances through lessons.
The emotional immature have great difficulty with some of the most fundamental aspects of the spiritual journey, such as:
Accepting lessons
Forgiving (yourself and others)
Praying
Consciously seeking positive aspects
Meditating
Overall, staying grounded rooted in Spirit
Some of you reading this may find that message hard to hear or may even not believe me because of where I am in my journey now. However, I want to emphasize that emotional maturity has many layers. It isn't always about your entire maturity level about everything. Sometimes, it's about an aspect of yourself that needs additional attention and further growth. Also, you can attain emotional maturity without a relationship.
Before I left my parent's home, every part of my life was in a literal state of survival mode. I felt like I was fighting in every aspect of my journey to be separate from my home environment's chaos. At the time, I couldn't even entirely focus on school like I should have because I needed independence first. There were so many elements of my childhood that I tried to run from that my missteps were inevitable when it came to relationships. Children of divorce often feel lost in their home environments, and my parent's separation came when I was consumed with being a teenager. The emotional breakdown came much later, manifested in poor decisions in my relationships with men and lack of guidance. In considering it now, a relationship itself seemed like it was something to escape.
The Struggle with Attracting Love…
And, let me let you in on a little secret. Every one of the women I am connected to that is struggling to find a relationship or to maintain a healthy one has one of the following wounds:
Identity struggle.
Not spiritually aligned with their current partner.
Exhibit codependency in romantic relationships and platonic ones.
Unhealed childhood abandonment wounds.
Not fully emotionally expressive.
They cannot clearly define what they are seeking in a partner.
An expectation that they will find a desirable partner without the need to heal the negative traits they would bring into the relationship.
You may be wondering why the journey is so hard for many of us to process, why we seem unable to do the work, and have the faith that we can change our circumstances. And it's because nobody wants to admit they are wrong. They want to be at the center of their circumstances until the spotlight is on them to change. We want to be forced to grow and then resist the process and deny the need for it.
I challenge women of color to consider all of these things as they continue their search for partnership and use them as points to consider as we project so many other reasons out into the universe as to why partnership escapes us. What we fail to believe in our search is that we need to find ourselves first. We need to take stock of who we are emotionally and if that aligns with what we seek. We consider attraction primarily relative to physical attributes outside of spirituality, but we always attract through our energy. If we are to attract someone that we truly desire, we must align our energy. That's the hard part; that's the soul work, the healing.
Let me encourage us not to wait until it is too late or wait for desperation to force the change. I realize now the thing that's unique to me, and my journey is that I intently knew when it was time to call forth something more. I knew I didn't have the tools, and they would not be found in my first guides--my parents. I was going to have to find someone or something else. And that's why I had more respect for the discovery process than most do. I refused to sit in anger and despair about my situation like a moody teenager. I sought more, and I received more.
Healing, maturity, and clarity proceed intention. Before I could get serious about a partnership, I had to activate the attraction point in my thoughts, actions, and energy. As you consider what type of partnership you desire, start with who you want to be.
The best piece of advice I ever got from a spiritual guide on relationships was this, "you will know your husband when you meet him." When I heard that, I received it in my soul just months before I met the man that would become my husband and the father of my children. I knew without a doubt that I still had work to do even then, and the work continues as I seek to maintain balance and evolution in my partnership.
Emotional maturity is possible for you, and with it, love can be unlocked in all forms. Emotional maturity is an awareness of growth in the psyche, in the being, and within all aspects of connection. It is a soulful state where emotions are balanced, and none are veering too far in either a positive or negative direction. It is a realized truth in the being, promoting consciousness, conscious being, and conscious actions.
If you would like to connect to see if we can travel this road to expansiveness and soul growth for you together, schedule time with me here.
And, check out these episodes of the podcast: