When I stopped looking for love, when I stopped needing it, that's when it came to me.

As a younger person, at your age, I met someone I thought might be "the one." Now I, like you, wanted to find peace or purpose. I wanted to be content with who I was, and what I intended to do here. I battled between being free to explore and the woman who I tried so desperately to love.

What I learned through years of cyclic relationship, psychedelic use, and the self-examination that came with it, is that I was involved in a very concrete pattern. It goes like this:

In relationship, everything is great. We fight plenty, but we make up plenty, things are okay. I feel stuck in my personal development. I try to use psychedelics to break through, I discover that my attachment to her is possibly preventing development. We break up. I progress rapidly for a short time, then become lonely. I develop an almost obsessive need to have her back. We get back together. Cycle repeats.

Even as I learned about it, I continued in the cycle. Codependency was a useful label to me, a convenient framework with which to observe relationships with similar patterns. I also studied my own family, my relations with my mother and father (who are our relationship blueprints) to see how that might affect my "need."

Eventually, we broke up and I was determined not to get back together. We still lived together. We still had sex, even. But I, having looked at an broken so many barriers in myself, found polyamory to be an expression of the true-est, free-est love. It is to always want the best for your partner. It is true non-possession.

So I tried this with her. She hated it. She was extremely jealous, even though I wasn't actively seeing anyone else. The potential itself made her intolerably insecure, as I now understood I used to be. After a while, she decided I wasn't worth the effort and we put up barriers between us to help prevent our getting back together.

Then, I was truly alone. I sought out service labor jobs, despite being a recent college grad. I wanted to exhaust myself. To dedicate myself to other beings (I worked at a farm animal sanctuary with mostly pigs; 300 of 'em!) This was an invaluable experience. At a late point in that 1.5 years of work, I came to understand that my service would be rewarded with love. That's when I met her.

We only spent two months together, as she had promised to go work in another state with a sanctuary in need of help. We got injured together, and my injuries are worse. I couldn't go with her. I have at least 4 more months (it's been 3) until I can I catch up with where she is.

Now, is this person, this new person, the one? Yes and no. There is no such thing. If she were to find someone who suits her better, I would be fully supportive of that, though it would certainly wound my heart. We allow one another the freedom to explore other relationships as we please, but we text a little every other day or so. She tells me about work, I send her little poems. We call once or twice a week and talk about our plans and our dreams.

We are free in one another, and that's why I feel as though I may have found love with some degree of permanence... It has that quality because neither of us are clinging to it. We are both able to love without condition.

That kind of love is more valuable to you, to your current partner, and to the world than any boundary you can possibly imagine, including a semi-permanent ultimately meaningless label on whether or not you are allowed to have romantic feelings toward others (which cannot be helped anyway.)

Of course, this is all just my experience, but it has been a beautiful one. I hope my story helps give you some direction.