I’ve written a lot lately about changing my life and my search for balance, peace of mind, strength, and spirituality.

Almost every time someone – most often a woman – writes kindly to suggest it was love mostly, if not entirely, that is responsible for the work I did on my self and the changes it brought to my life.

“With all respect due,” a valued blog reader wrote yesterday, ” having someone to love and to love you in return creates a strength not everyone possesses. At least this was my experience.”

I don’t disagree with a word of that. It is all true.

Love has given me enormous strength. But that falls short of describing or understanding my own experience, and where my strength really came from. I need to be honest about it.

Earlier this week, a different reader wrote, “I’ve been following you for years. Maria is the reason you changed after you met her you became a good man. I saw it happen.”

What a great compliment. But is it a compliment at all?

I can’t overstate the impact Maria had on my life.

She saved it and changed it in more ways than I could ever describe or even articulate. My love for her and appreciation for her seems evident to anyone who reads my writing regularly, or even occasionally.

At the same time – and Maria would be the first person to agree to this – it just isn’t that simple for me. It just doesn’t tell the whole story

My love for Maria is grounded in real emotion and hard work, it is not a magic wand or mystical medicine for all of the troubles that have ailed me. Two people who were lonely and often misunderstood, we got each other right away.

But she is not responsible for the changes in my life, and I am not responsible for the changes in her life. We are cheerleaders for one another, not wizards.

Redemption is something you have to do for yourself; no one else can do it for you. Love cannot cure everything that ails.

My healing work began nearly 40 years ago when I went to a child psychiatrist to try to understand the psyche of my daughter Emma, who had just been born. I wanted to know what I needed to know to deal with a newborn baby. I didn’t want to mess her up.

I was soon to learn that the one who was messed up was me. Emma was fine. But this analyst – she had known Freud and his daughter Anna –  told me I was strong enough to get where I wished to go if I decided to. I did.

My psychiatrist and I connected, and I spent the next five years in analysis. I spent the next 25 years after that in talking therapy and on various anti-anxiety medications. I never quit on my treatment or denied for one second that I needed it.

But I never imagined just how much I needed.

When I met Maria, I had been in therapy for decades, and I had just broken down, right after my divorce.  I had been living alone for six years and was in pieces and at the end of my rope. But I knew a lot about myself by then, enough to know I need a lot of help.

Maria and I found one another, and through her and our love, I began true healing, I finally had the incentive I needed to face up to myself and change. I had given up on life; she restored my faith in it.

I committed to my therapy and truly opened up to it. I saw the worst parts of me, acknowledged them, and resolved to heal and change.

It would be unfair to Maria to put all of this change and drama on her. And it would be false, a story some people liked to hear but not the truth.

And it would be unfair to me to suggest that another person coming into my love and loving me brought about all of this change. I’ve been working on it a long time.

Maria is a beautiful human being; she is not a magician; she is not Freud. It would not be good for our relationship if she were; I never met a therapist I wanted to marry.

A therapist is very different from a spouse or partner.

The trained and experienced mental health professionals I found took me on, beat me up, challenged and consoled me, guided me away from the madness to an understanding myself self and helped me to begin the long and arduous process of healing.

They were the ones who helped me love myself, not just Maria. They were the ones who made me face the truth about myself. They were ones who assured me that I could change, that I was strong enough and committed enough to see it through, rather than talk about it.

And they were the ones who taught me how.

Those were not things any partner could do. They were not things Maria would ever want to do.

People often tell me or write to me to say that I have become a different person.

I want to say that I don’t believe that anyone, least of all me, can become a different person. I have no wish to become anyone else; I am just beginning to like me. And I am still profoundly flawed.

But I can be a better person, and I’m working on that.

As many of you know, I have become an advocate for love, even a warrior for compassion. I could never quantify how much a part of that change Maria and her love for me is or has been.

That is too much for me to gauge.

But I am no saint, and my struggles are not over, just like you.

I don’t wish to live with a saint either.

She and I are two human beings, working hard together to live creative and meaningful lives. We have a great love for one another. But we are not just another love story. Outside of Disney Studios, I’m not sure it is ever that simple.

I don’t need or wish to emotionalize our love, and I don’t want either of us to be the objects of miraculous stories of fantasy and redemption. That would be the wrong message for people to take from us.

Love is a defining element in both of our lives. It is not the only one.

I think our ordinariness is the source of so much of our love; our story is straightforward and honest. We just love each other.

Like the philosopher said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I hope I never need to make it more than it truly is. It is beautiful enough.