broken hearts | David M Masters

Six months ago, a business consulting client of mine comes in for his regularly scheduled appointment and says, “I almost married a Mexican hooker!” I think he gets the award for the most shocking opening line. If that doesn’t get your attention, I don’t know what does.

As a business consultant, coach, and counselor, if you are worth your salt in this line of work, your intuitive resources are vast and you’re able to shift your focus quickly and precisely or be able to call in backup in a heartbeat.

In this circumstance, I was able to shift gears and swap hats to help my client navigate this drastic distraction from his forward momentum focused on his track of personal growth and business success.

As a business consultant, I was casually aware of James’ engagement to Maria, and they have been cohabitating for a year since becoming engaged. He had also mentioned before that communication between him and his betrothed was periodically complex due to English being her second language. He had intimated those misunderstandings were commonplace and she would get upset and react negatively once she had misunderstood what he had said.

After a while, James would be able to explain what he had meant to her satisfaction and she would drop her defensive attacks, but bring them up amidst later complicated entanglements where details lost in translation were seen as attacks on Maria’s unquestionable character.

One day, about three months earlier, his brother saw Maria leave her car in a restaurant parking lot and get into another car driven by a man. James’ brother felt uneasy about witnessing this event that his intention was to follow her in this car to see where she was headed but lost them at the traffic light.

Still feeling uneasy about the situation, he told James about what he had seen. James thought he had felt a mysterious disconnection in their relationship, so he had decided to hire a Private Investigator. I was not aware of this chapter taking place as James and I were focused on his buying another business at the time. This says a lot about his ability to move forward even when facing an otherwise distracting time of life at the same time.

He said that he felt he could release the pressure of worrying about the situation by hiring the PI, and that was his intention for just hiring someone else to deal with it. If it turned out to be nothing, no problem. If it ended up being something to be dealt with, he would tend to it when it came to light. (Had he asked me, I might have advised against hiring a detective, as I am of the opinion that it should be a last-ditch effort, not the first line of defense.)

It turns out his brother’s concerns were warranted, but she was not having an affair. This was not a boyfriend. No, he was one of a long line of casual sex partners that she was servicing throughout the week for over a year. Two to three times a week Maria would have them pick her up in an agreed-upon public parking lot and return her to her car after the deed was done (which usually took about an hour and a half). Most of them were one-time-only clients.

According to the investigator, and unbeknownst to James, Maria has two high-functioning cell phones to conduct her affairs that are not related to her personal cell phone account. One phone utilizes an app that functions as a discrete hook-up device for live meetups. This app accounts for meetings, like the one James’ brother witnessed. Maria’s parking lot rendezvous average 26 minutes from pickup to return to her car.

The other phone uses another app that is used for paid live video mutual masturbation as an alternative source of revenue. The jury is still out on whether the live parking lot meetings are also an alternate source of funding, but James’ inclination is that these are paid trysts as well.

Armed with evidence and verifiable data provided by the P.I., James confronted his fiancé and she denied everything and caused a huge quarrel with Maria where she accused James of being a jealous and vindictive person who judged her cruelly for being Mexican, packed her bags, and exited the premises.

James is confused and distraught, as he was well in love with Maria and desired to marry her, but rather than talking this out and seeing their relationship could continue, she just took off and him holding the empty bag. He has dodged the bullet of a potentially toxic marriage.

I am helping to support him with his varying issues and feelings about all this as we continue to move forward with his business dealings, hoping not to let any complications of his personal life interfere with his professional performance.

A good consultant, coach, or counselor should be able to be highly adaptive to the client’s needs as challenges arise. Had I not had these skills onboard, I would have called in some relationship back up right away. I work with a wide variety of consultants, coaches, and counselors, with wide-spanning areas of expertise. My clients and I are comforted knowing help is just a call, text, or email away.

Let life have its way with you but don’t let it stop your forward momentum professionally.*

* =Or at least try to keep it to a minimum.

Surely there is no greater love than to experience that sweet connection between two human beings, separated by bodies but united in a strong love-connection that transcends time and space. This love can take many forms, like friendship, familial love, appreciative/respectful love, romantic love, eternal love, love for the others and the world, etc…

Being a love-child of the sixties (this is where I place the blame, though I realize the source could have come from elsewhere) I resonated with the love vibration that permeated the time. I was not attracted to – nor did I participate in – the “free love” movement that was prevalent back in the day, rather I embraced the idea of loving one another, accepting people for who they are and allowing everyone to find their own way, loving them all along their journey.

My sincere desire to participate in management of great love is likely why I was so attracted to ministerial work early on because the religious model that I was exposed to (then, in the late seventies) seemed to promote this kind of love. My fore’ into the business of religion did not turn into a life-long occupation, yet I continued in my personal work of helping others achieve their highest and best, while continuing to seek and promote higher forms of love and respect for others.

Throughout my life I always found it interesting (not only from a purely scientific viewpoint) that – even though I believed that each human was blessed with an innate capacity for love – some people seemed to be incapable of being able to truly connect to other individuals, experience compassion, empathy, or have a love-appreciation for concepts or things, like art. To witness the most beautiful sunset, or some other scene in nature, examine the details of someone’s art, see a heart-felt musical performance, see someone struggling for survival and to not be emotionally impacted; this surprised me.

Nowadays, I can wrap my head around the concept of someone who is devoid of an ability to love (as most the rest of us would define it), as is the case for most sociopaths, psychopaths or others at various locations along the anti social personality disorder spectrum; but otherwise “normal” people?

People with the inability to be moved to tears for anything except for pain or great fear…

Of course, I was raised under the tenet of, “big boys don’t cry,” like many of us (especially those of the male persuasion) and I maintained a tearless approach to life until the fateful day in 1982, following the viewing of E.T. with my young son, Nathanial. As the credits rolled, we both sat in silence, until he broke into the tearful sentiment, “I didn’t want him to go.” I joined in, and haven’t stopped since.

And I get that in our current societal structure, love is seen as weakness. In this respect it is understandable that one might numb one’s self to the idea of opening up enough to allow a wildly painful experience. These people had the capacity to love, but have taken extensive efforts to dismantle the ability in favor of self-preservation.

To complicate the landscape even more, there’s the whole “battle of the sexes” role reversal that figures into the picture of our love metamorphosis. In the past men were dominant over women, now women are exerting their dominance in an unlimited variety of ways.

Love is a terrible thing to waste shredder sign love waste

And still there are others who have never really had the ability to love… What about those people? Are they more inclined to use and manipulate other people serving their own selfish wants, needs and desires (but not in a narcissistic way)? Do they maintain relationships that are seen as highly disposable? And how does this all impact others who are authentic, loving people?

In my work (and in my life) it is not uncommon for me to meet people whose hearts have been broken by others who never had the capacity to return love in kind. Some of them heal and look for a more authentic love, while others allow their hearts to harden vowing to never love again.

To those with hardened hearts, I beseech you, consider learning to love again; the world needs your love now, more than ever.

I believe there is a progressive wave of love that is spreading throughout this planet as part of our human evolution.

What part will you play in this loving future?