In the Meantime: Finding Yourself and the Love You Want by Iyanla Vanzant

From Barnes & Noble

Through the years, we sometimes build psychological and emotional walls around ourselves and our dreams. Reconnecting internally can be a challenge. But with a strong, empathetic guide like Vanzant, the journey is manageable, the goal achievable. Stop postponing the act of living, pretending that all will be better tomorrow. Unless you engage the world, life will pass you by.

From the Publisher

Most of us go through life with a vision of what the ideal relationship is supposed to be, yet too often our longing for a soul mate leads to disappointment and heartbreak. What we see, desire, or harshly judge in our mate is but a reflection of self, Vanzant explains, as in IN THE MEANTIME she helps us to break free of our fantasies and view a relationship as an ongoing process of discovery and growth. Whether she is offering practical advice on how to avoid making the same relationship mistakes over and over again, or helping us to view the painful end of a relationship as an opportunity to learn and change, Iyanla Vanzant, as author Patrice Gains has said, 'reminds us that every moment is an opportunity to learn and inspires and encourages us to continue our inward daily search'.

USA Today

Iyanla Vanzant taps the universality of spiritual yearning.

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

People cannot fulfill your needs. They may want to, they may try to. They may convince you that they can, but they cannot. What people can do for one another is make the need seem less urgent. We distract one another so that we forget, temporarily, what we need. We help one another replace a pressing need with something else. In the meantime, the need does not disappear. It dissipates. In a nutshell, people need love. God is love. What we need is God, but that's too esoteric for most of us to handle. It's also pretty frightening!

To say we need God conjures up some pretty frightening images for most of us, the most frightening of all being those things we believe we will have to give up to get to God. Instead, we say we need the love of another person because this is the kind of love most of us believe we can handle -- to some degree or another. We also think we need a house, a car, a few kids, and a job so that we can feed the kids. Of course, these things are important, even essential to our well-being, but what we really need to live on, and live in, is love. We also think that things and people bring more love into our lives. Do they? On some level they do. What they do in actuality is provide us with the opportunity to share the love we are and the love we have within, which is God's love.

We are not always aware of how our needs lead us into dark corners. Try as we might to be alert, strong, and positive when it comes to love matters, many of us seem to always end up someplace we do not want to be -- alone in the meantime, looking for a relationship.

Over the years, I have heard absolute horror stories about the goings-on called love. At times I have been amazed that we could believe that something as divine as love could show up looking so ridiculous. In other situations, I have been appalled at the foul things people do in the name of love. Finally, I had to stop. To smack myself. To realize -- there is a pattern here! The players are different. The events are different, but somewhere underneath it all there is a sameness. Men and women have a tendency to do the same things when they are trying to get their needs met. I decided to keep a list. I wrote down the thirteen most common things we do in search of love or a relationship in which we want to be loved. Each of these things will inevitably fail to meet our needs. They will take us to a hellish meantime experience:

1. All the signs say this is not the one, but you ignore your internal alarms, and move ahead into a love fantasy.

2. Because you fear being alone, or because you believe you cannot have what you want in a relationship, you accept the first person who comes along, only to be left, beaten, ripped off, or impregnated and then left, beaten, ripped off.

3. You confuse friendship and niceness with romantic love.

4. Because someone is nice to you and you are not used to it, you don't know how to say no to them when you realize they are not who you want.

5. You get caught up in the packaging and promises.

6. You force your desires for a relationship onto another person, or issue an ultimatum. Because the person does not know how to say no, s/he goes along with you . . . for a while.

7. Because the other person expresses an interest in you, you respond without really exploring if this is who or what you want.

8. You allow blind faith, which leads to blind love, to take you into a relationship that is unhealthy.

9. You choose to believe that what your partner has done to another person, s/he will not do to you.
10. Sexual compatibility is mistaken for love.

11. You stay in a relationship although you are miserable, trying to work things out even when your partner shows no interest in working through the difficulty.

12. You don't express what you really feel because you believe it will hurt your partner's feelings.

13. You choose to believe your partner's lies even when you know the truth. You act like you do not know what is going on when you do.

LOVE IS NOTHING THAT GIVES YOU EVERYTHING

What can you do when a relationship is not going the way you would like? When things are not working the way you want them to work? How do you learn to take what you have and make it work to your advantage? As I ask these questions, I am reminded of a story I heard about a woman named Luanne Bellarts, who was born with cerebral palsy. As a result of this disease, Luanne had full use of one toe, on one foot. Raised by very religious parents, she learned a great deal about truth, trust, patience, faith, and love as it related to her capabilities. I am sure most of us would consider this kind of physical limitation to be an insurmountable or monumental defeat. Luanne, however, learned to type on a computer keyboard using her big toe. She wrote the story of her life, Bird with a Broken Wing, in this way. Her book was her testimony to the power of faith, in which she eloquently described how to turn trouble into triumph, tragedy into victory. She wrote about the meantime, about learning how to take what you are, what you have, and what you can do, and make it work for you.

Luanne's story is not about relationships per se. It is, however, about principles. Truth, trust, patience, honor, and faith are the cornerstone principles of all life's relationships. They are also all the things we receive in the presence of unconditional love. Having learned so much about family relationships, friendships, and, more important, the selfship, Luanne documented how to develop and nurture all relationships with the vigilant employment of loving principles. What she learned while lying flat on her back, sitting in a wheelchair, and being totally dependent on others is exactly what we able-bodied beings stumble over, muddle through, fall into, and fail to recognize about relationships. Although Luanne never experienced an intimate, loving relationship with a man, the way we believe it should be, she did with one toe, on one foot, what we spend most of our lives trying to do. She discovered love. Love for herself. The love for and of others. The love of God. She figured out what love looks like and what it should not look like. She understood what love felt like and what it felt like when there is an absence of love. She discovered how to find love, nurture it, and make it last in yourself, for yourself, and within your life. At age thirty- six, Luanne died of cancer. In the meantime, during the course of her life, she lived in and for love with a tremendous amount of dignity. Finding love and maintaining our dignity is something we often struggle to do in our relationships. The experience of the struggle is called the meantime.

Excerpt from IN THE MEANTIME, copyright © 1998 by Iyanla Vanzant. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

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She was not looking for him. He was not looking for her. As a matter of fact, they were both somewhat attached to other people. Yet, the minute they saw each other, their body parts began to twitch, and their eyes began to sparkle. The meantime was brewing. They worked their way across the room, neither aware that the other was doing the same thing. He spoke first. No, she did. She asked him a silly question to which he and his twitching body parts were more than willing to respond. He ducked his attachment. She ducked hers. They needed some time to talk. They did, and they laughed, something neither of them seemed to do very often with their attachments. They exchanged telephone numbers to their places of employment. Although they both knew, they both acted like they didn't. Reluctantly, they both rejoined their attachments, and together they entered a simmering pot of meantime stew.

When you are not happy where you are and you are not quite sure if you want to leave or how to leave, you are in the meantime. It's a state of limbo. You are hanging on, ready to let go, afraid to fall, not wanting to hurt yourself, afraid you will hurt someone else. In the meantime, you pray the other person will let go first so that you will not feel guilty.

The other person keeps dropping hints, letting you know that it's time to go. You deny it! Why? You don't know why, but I can tell you that the meantime is fraught with don't knows and can't do's. Don't know why I can't go. Don't know why I should stay. Don't know where I'm going. Don't know how I am going to get there, wherever there is. Ambivalence, confusion, reluctance, and paralysis are all characteristics of the meantime. If you knew the answers to these questions you would be just fine. In the meantime, you are many things, fine is probably not one of them!

Life would be so much easier if, when we hit a snag in a relationship, any relationship, we would stop, address it, and move ahead smoothly. The truth is, in most cases, we could do just that. The reality is, we don't do it! We keep moving. We allow little insults to become raging angers, little arguments to become festering feuds, little pains to become deep wounds, and we keep moving. In many cases, we keep hurting. When the relationship at issue is an intimate, loving one, the attempt to move forward without addressing the pain only complicates matters, further poisoning the relationship.

How can I stay and not get hurt? How can I go without hurting? You cannot answer these questions if you are in pain. What you can do is make the effort to discover the truth about love, because it is the only thing that can help you move through the experience. In the meantime, if we can remain loving of ourselves and toward other people by staying in conscious and honest communication, a disruption, snag, or delay in a relationship becomes a healing process. When we cannot, we engage in meantime behavior—hurting, fighting, not telling the truth, and moving forward in confusion. Confusion begets confusion.

Back to our meantime lovers. Two weeks later, she called him at work. He had already called her twice, but hung up when her voice mail answered. In the meantime, they each tried to convince themselves that they should not call each other again, but they desperately needed to see each other. He invited her out for a drink. She set the date, time, and place. He showed up with a rose, a single pink rose. The minute she saw it and him, the twitching body parts began to thump. Her attachment became a blur, and she didn't know what to do. He did. He said all the right things, in just the right tone of voice, at the right moment, which created a corresponding thumping in his corresponding body parts. She told him about her attachment. He told her about his. Well, not exactly. Although there was someone, his someone knew what the deal was. That's when she realized she was headed for trouble. Quickly, she made her excuses and took her thumping body parts home. In the meantime, he had two more drinks and tried to figure out what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. Let's talk about love in the meantime. Life is all about love. Love is the only true meaning of life. Being alive means that we are occupants in love's house and are accountable to love's rules. Neither life nor love requires us to give up our dignity, self-worth, career objectives, favorite television program, or our good common sense. For some reason, we don't always understand this. We believe in the necessity of giving up one thing in order to get something else. We especially believe this about love. We do not understand that the highest expression of love is the experience and realization of more—more of who you are, what you do, what you believe, and what you have. Love has the ability to bring all of you together under one roof, at one time, as one experience. Love is the experience of oneness, a union of the mind and heart. Unfortunately, we believe we can establish this union with others only if we give up something. We attempt to create this union with others before first creating it within ourselves. This is absolutely impossible. You cannot get love from the outside until you arelove on the inside. In the meantime, we do many things in the name of love, for the sake of love.

We live in the meantime while we are learning about love. We flounder around, involving ourselves in strange alliances, making up rules as we go along, in the name of what we think love is, or should be. We watch and listen to others, believing they know all there is to know about love and relationships. The truth is that they, like the rest of us, are learning by trial and error. At best, we pick and choose who to love and how we will love them. At worst, we discover that it is virtually impossible to do enough, fast enough, for enough people, in enough situations to receive from them the love, admiration, or acceptance we seem to need. In the meantime, while we are learning the truth about love, we can make a pretty big mess of most things. Nowhere do we make a bigger mess than in our so-called loving relationships.

They were at it again! He and she both knew that they needed to make a swift but loving departure from the relationships they were in. Neither of them had the courage, strength, or presence of mind to do so. He didn't leave because his attachment had been so good to him. In the three-plus years they had been together, they had really been through a lot—a lot of hysteria about whether or not they should stay together! In the end, they stayed together because they had nowhere else to go. She stayed with her attachment to avoid facing the fear of spending time alone. She had been there and done that so many times before. It was not a very pleasant possibility to look forward to, and she surely did not want to subject herself to it voluntarily. In the meantime, she kept hoping against hope that somehow, some way, her attachment would miraculously disappear or become the love man of her dreams, meaning that she would live happily ever after. That's how she convinced herself, time and time again, to stay. In the meantime, she kept looking elsewhere for something else, although she was not quite sure what it was she was looking for.

Love is the only thing we need. Love is our peace. Love is our joy, health, and wealth. Love is our identity. We go into a relationship looking for love, not realizing that we must bring love with us. We must bring a strong sense of self and purpose into a relationship. We must bring a sense of value, of who we are. We must bring an excitement about ourselves, our lives, and the vision we have for these two essential elements. We must bring a respect for wealth and abundance. Having achieved it to some satisfactory degree on our own, we must move into relationships willing to share what we have, rather than being afraid of someone taking it. Joyful sharing and excitement. Value, purpose, and vision. That's what love is about. When we bring these things to the relationship, love becomes a great multiplier and enhances the experience of life. When we do not have these things in place, the search to find love sets up the experiences we need to discover what is true about love and what is not. The discovery process is called the meantime.

We enter relationships looking for love, expecting someone to love us or accept us lovingly. This makes perfectly good sense if you consider that we are each born to express and receive love. In some unfortunate situations, we can want love or acceptance so badly that we will do almost anything to get it. We break love's rules. We disregard love's house. We forget to set love boundaries. We allow people to step in, be in, move in, live in our lives in ways that have nothing to do with love. Even when we have boundaries or standards clearly defining what we will do, how we will do it in the name of love, and what we expect in return, there never seems to be enough love to fill the void we have all, at one time or another, felt in our hearts. When we believe we do not have enough love in our lives, we enter the meantime. What we fail to understand is that we are the love we seek. Until, however, we can recognize ourselves as love and live in harmony with our true identity, the void grows deeper, wider, and more painful.

They just didn't get it! He called several times during the next several weeks. At first, she refused to return his calls. She was struggling to shake and break her attachment. He had already shaken his, although he had forgotten to tell her that she had been shook! "Surely she knows!" he thought. "She has to know!" In the meantime, people often forget to say what they mean or mean what they say because they assume you already know. He did not assume that he would pass her on the street, but he did. The moment they saw each other, the thumping started—his mind, her heart, and their body parts. They spoke. Actually, she spoke first. He responded by talking to her about the calls. Feeling guilty, as we often do in the meantime, she agreed to call him later. She did, and they agreed to meet.

When you're in the meantime you want an escape route! You want something to do other than all that meantime stuff. They wanted to do something about their thumping body parts. They wanted to be attached to one another. They thought it was love. It had to be love! Why else would it keep showing up, thumping and giving them the perfect excuse to break all other attachments. The meantime is not about breaking up attachments. It is about creating attachments honestly and lovingly. However, in the meantime, the thumping body parts are completely unaware of this little tidbit of information. He made the offer. She accepted. On opposite sides of town, both of their other attachments were fed up with excuses and ready to do another kind of thumping of body parts!

Copyright © 1998 by Iyanla Vanzant