I got married! And now I believe in God.

On learning to surrender.

Don’t worry, i’m not going to start preaching. What i’m sharing is firmly rooted in messy humanity, with just the right amount of magic. Getting married absolutely helped me more firmly believe in power(s) greater than myself. Something else was present on that weekend that was much bigger than me.

What a relief.

See one might say I like control. For as long as I can remember I had been absolutely terrified of commitment. I had made up stories that relationships meant complete loss of freedom, subjugation of one’s needs, and a constant mirror/reminder as to why I wasn’t enough. Those stories had me picking partners, bosses, and friends that reinforced this narrative for roughly the first three decades of my life, until I started therapy and men’s work. Then began a pendulum swing period of my own single grandiosity, making up stories about how nobody else was enough, didn’t check my boxes, and that we’d never work for x y and z reason (read: protective distancing behavior). Just two sides of the same control coin, having gone from one down to one up, but still driven by fear and shame of not being enough.

Then came Diana, my wife. Our first date was a sober dance party at the House of Yes in Brooklyn. It felt free, equal, expansive, peaceful and playful - all at once. It felt like we’d known each other for millennia, and we laughed a lot. This was just as I was changing careers from advertising to become a therapist, shedding a career my conditioning pointed me towards for a career my soul pointed me towards. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, if you’re familiar with The Pattern (an uncannily accurate Astrology app), it said we were “Soul Mates”. But fear not astrology haters, I discounted and resisted this for some time, still buying into a pop psychology narrative that if you have any doubts whatsoever “it’s a no” - it has to be a “fuck yes” from the start. For me until that time, I had only ever felt a “fuck yes” for people who severely triggered my “not enough” wound. Hello, trauma and insecure attachment. Those relationships were explosive, high and low, full of conflict and power struggle, and very certainly not helping either person reach their highest Self whatsoever. This relationship was different and my fears and wounds had me doubting the safety I felt. Thank the Universe we worked through it.

Enter years of parts work therapy, men’s work, couples work, psychedelics, coaching, tantra, dancing, making magic, traveling the world, fighting and repairing, great friends and family, and growth alongside my unbelievable soul-partner. Hello, relationship school. Through each next level of commitment (moving across country, moving in together, getting engaged, and then marriage), I doubted, resisted, and then felt immense relief, safety, assuredness, and greater confidence. A turning point I’ll remember forever was a mentor saying to me with total warm and loving firmness, “Patch, when are you going to grow up?” (Okay, Diana may have said this to me a few memorable times, too.) It might sound harsh, but it’s precisely what I needed, he made the implicit explicit and I felt healthy disgust and incongruence. I was someone who viewed myself as obsessed with growth and integrity, yet was refusing to grow and living out of alignment. This moment rewired my neural pathway and I proposed later that year. Ironically, after proposing I felt much less afraid and much more safe. It felt totally right and the doubts mostly faded.

Similarly and on a parallel path, I doubted my career transition to therapy with the same levels of intense resistance. In my experiences, and what I’ve seen now as a therapist, doubt certainly is not always a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it’s a sign that it’s very right. The two best decisions of my life I doubted the most: becoming a therapist and getting married to Diana. And yet neither were about the decision itself. At their core, the doubt was about if I was worthy of them. Worthy of holding sacred space, worthy of loving and being loved by an incredible human.

As some of the best thinkers have said:

“Where your fear is, there is your task” - Carl Jung

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasures you seek” - Joseph Campbell

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” - Marcus Aurelius

I was actually afraid of parts of me healing and growing. I was afraid of joy, fulfillment, contentment, acceptance. It was not familiar.

Then came the wedding. The cliches that protective parts of me tried their best to preemptively dismiss and devalue came true, it was unequivocally the best weekend of my life. The weather forecast was predicting torrential downpour for months, yet the entire weekend’s weather was absolutely perfect. Everyone danced their hearts out all weekend and vibes were HIGH. Di and I were exquisitely present and rooted. Our friends and family, from completely different cultures, got along great. I fell even deeper in love with Diana listening to her friend’s speeches about her, reading our vows to each other, and watching her in what can only be described as complete majesty. My four-year-old nephew, who has been head-over-heels in love with Diana since day one, at one point turned to his dad with his jaw on the floor and said in Portuguese “Daddy, it’s a real princess!” The whole weekend was one big fat “YES, it’s gonna be great!” from the universe, “God”, and from our entire community. It was definitely bigger than us and simultaneously so very much us. It was magical. I am smiling as I write this. Guh!

It may sound absolutely crazy, but I found greater connection to “God” through, with, and in Diana. And I now see that “God” and Love are essentially the same thing. I can’t wait to keep letting them in, repeatedly admitting my own powerlessness, and surrendering to the uncontrollable nature of both. What a blessing. What a relief.

If you’re reading this and thinking, damn that’s me. Maybe this is your sign to lean in. Take a leap. Believe in Love. Believe in the Universe, “God”, whatever. You deserve it.