We had a very good time just hanging out and catching up on each other's lives. He was as I remembered, funny, intelligent, engaging, gentlemanly, someone I once contemplated marriage with and a man I still love dearly.
As the conversation flowed, the years disappeared, and we waltzed away an evening of shared histories, wonderful memories and a gentle, mutual affection for each other.
While my heart ached a little as the evening came to an end, for beauty always makes me weep and the evening was hauntingly perfect, I was mainly grateful that I am no longer the woman he once knew - co-dependent, needy and lacking in self-esteem.
Instead, the experience of being loved unconditionally and so generously over the last six years has transformed me into a woman who is confident, sure and comfortable in her own skin, mostly at peace with herself and the world.
Andrew Comisky writes in his book Strength in Weakness that "the freedom to be for another requires security in one's personal identity as male or female".
He offers a Biblical understanding of what it is to be created man and woman which confirmed for me what I had always thought of as my own personal neurosis. Now I know it's just my own 'womanly' tendencies.
In understanding my "more developed relational sensibilities" as woman and the inclination to a "desire" (Genesis 3:16) that Comisky describes as "inordinate desire, an exclusive possessive yearning for the man", I can see why I had previously made 'the man in my life' my entire world and was consequently a slave to my emotional attachment.
It has taken four years of singlehood, time well spent in discovering who, how, what and why I am, and a process that has allowed me to become secure in an identity forged in truth and freedom, bringing balance to who I am as woman.
As I grow into my "true self" I am able to relate to others, especially of the opposite sex, in ways more multi-dimensional and varied than previously. I am able to engage in healthy and affirming friendships with men.
Even as I recognize that I will always love PCT for what we had, the eros type of love I had for him has become a philia kind of love and I am now free to love him for who he is, an old and dear friend, nothing more or less. Much kinder to my heart.
After dinner, I came home to the one man who made it all possible - my main man, JC.
And I thank God for that.
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