It sounds beautiful when spoken aloud, almost convincing, as though love, when given deeply enough, could settle every wandering thought. As though being cherished could make another person stop wondering what waits beyond the boundaries of what they already have.
But can it?
Perhaps that is where the question begins.
The Other Side of the Fence
Imagine standing in a field of green grass.
It is beneath your feet, and you know its softness. You know where the ground rises and where it dips. You know what it has taken to keep it alive.
Yet your eyes keep wandering toward the fence.
There is another field on the other side, and from where you stand, something about it seems sweeter, more alluring, perhaps even more tasteful than what you already have.
And so you look.
Then you look again.
Distance has a way of protecting a fantasy.
From across the fence, you don’t see everything required to tend that soil. You see only what catches the eye.
Meanwhile, beneath your own feet are things that once meant something to you: trust, familiarity, companionship, the quiet way someone shows up, the life that has been built one ordinary day at a time.
None of it necessarily changed.
Perhaps you simply stopped noticing.
Sometimes, while we’re busy wondering what waits on the other side, we forget to look down.
Is Love Enough?
But what about the person standing beside you?
What if they love you well?
What if they encourage your dreams, carry their share—and sometimes more—believe in what the two of you are building, and continue choosing you when life is far less romantic than it was in the beginning?
Would all of that be enough to keep your eyes from wandering?
Maybe that’s the wrong question.
Maybe another person’s love was never supposed to carry the responsibility for our loyalty.
There are things love can give freely. But there are other things each of us must decide to bring with us.
And perhaps betrayal begins before the act itself.
Perhaps it begins in the looking.
The entertaining.
The quiet permission we give ourselves to move a little closer to the fence.
Sometimes the wandering itself becomes the doorway.
The Kool-Aid Problem
Then something happens.
While you’ve been looking across the fence, you begin to suspect that someone may be looking toward your side.
Funny how quickly the view can change.
The grass beneath your feet suddenly looks different when you imagine somebody else admiring it.
Now you’re paying attention.
Now there are questions.
Who is looking over here?
What do they want?
How close have you gotten to the fence?
And somewhere inside all of that concern sits an uncomfortable contradiction:
How easily can we grant ourselves permission to wonder while expecting someone else to remain exactly where we left them?
How can we pour from our own cup elsewhere and become offended by the thought of someone dipping into ours?
That’s the Kool-Aid problem.
It’s easy to examine somebody else’s cup.
Harder to examine what we’ve been doing with our own.
The Mirror
Suspicion has an interesting way of turning our attention outward.
What are you doing?
Who are you talking to?
Why are they interested in you?
But perhaps another question belongs in that conversation:
What am I doing?
There are moments when the thing we need most isn’t another view across the fence.
It’s a mirror.
Not to condemn ourselves. Not to pretend every relationship survives simply because we finally recognize our mistakes.
But to see.
To notice where our attention has gone. What we’ve neglected. What we’ve taken for granted. What we’ve expected from another person while excusing in ourselves.
Sometimes the hardest reflection to face is our own.
When the Grass Was Green All Along
There may be a moment when you finally turn around.
The field beyond the fence doesn’t look quite the way you imagined anymore.
And for the first time in a long time, you really see what had been there all along:
the goodness,
the investment,
the ordinary faithfulness you once mistook for something ordinary.
You see all those things that familiarity had made easy to overlook.
But recognition does not always arrive on time.
Sometimes we discover the value of something while we still have the opportunity to tend it.
Sometimes we don’t.
And maybe that is the question worth sitting with:
Before you decide the grass is greener on the other side, when was the last time you tended what was already yours?
Heart & Pen by Léona
Write the Feeling— Share the Atmosphere