I have been married four times. “WOW! You won’t get married again will you?” Well, my first marriage ended because the father of my two beautifull daughters came out as gay, where I could find out what sex is like with other men, no longer being a virgin as I was when first married. Number one amicable divorce. Second marriage spurred me to fly off the cliff of a strict religious addiction, to be ME, at least begin to be. A few years after our friendly divorce he was diagnosed with cancer and died at the young age of 44. Third marriage happened after living together for a year, separated for 6 months, then married after believing he had given up cigarettes and not numbing out his feelings with alcohol. One year later, he was smoking again, and said if you can’t accept me as I am, we’ll get divorced. I needed more emotional intimacy. Another amicable divorce. Fourth marriage to Gregory felt like my soul mate, and indeed he was, because he triggered my childhood wounds of not being trusted with my own way of believing and feeling…he couldn’t trust me like my parents couldn’t out of their own unawAREness. My soul is where my heart’s deepest hopes and fears lie, and Gregory’s distrust of me, accusing me of having affairs, broke my soul-heart open to a deeper space in me that even as a psychotherapist I was not awARE of. I sobbed, I stomped my feet like a toddler, I closed my private practice for a year to attend the Primal Center on the other side of America…to retrieve my soul, and to hope that Gregory would do the same. I expressed my rage in weekly individual and group therapy which served as a surfboard into my ocean of tears, which washes truer-love into mySelf and Gregory even when he wrote horrible lies about me in his lawyer-response to me serving him divorce papers. That was the year 2000, two years after I left Gregory; I dropped the divorce proceeding until he came to me in 2006, saying he could now agree to a friendly divorce, saying “No one has ever loved me like you Dianea.” Due to my grieving and retrieving of truer little Dianea I was able to send him loving birthday and holiday cards and call him on his birthday those eight years apart. 2004-2005 I lived with my boyfriend where the marriage question was never approached….not meant to be. It is spring 2013, and am recently dating a man I met at a Stardust ballroom weekend with whom I am falling in love. Just this past weekend, we were hiking in Buttermilk Falls State Park, where the melody of cascading waterfalls harmonized the music in my head composing how I would say I love you to him. Would I wait for him to say it first as I have in the past from other men, or would I relinquish the fear of rejection and be whole? As we walked down the last steep hill, I stopped him and said, “You know something?” “What?” “I love you.” (For those of you wondering what happened next: tune in to next month’s readers write)