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We can love someone with our whole hearts and still lose them. They can leave us. They can make it impossible for us to do anything other than leave them. They could walk out the door and get hit by a bus. We can hold the love we have for them close to our hearts, but we can’t make the ones we love stay with us forever, as much as we might like that.
Which is why I offer you the beginner’s guide to loving and losing.
I feel uniquely qualified for this conversation because I have loved and lost more times than I care to count. I offer up my own experience to those who are just finding their way through that first heartache. Perhaps being the one to write a guide seems counter-intuitive, as loving and losing so often might mean that I’m failing at love rather than succeeding. It might even seem more of a comfort to get advice from ones who have managed to hold tight to their love, never losing it. So noted.
While it may seem that I’m a bit over-qualified for this topic while being simultaneously under-qualified in the area of forever love, I’d like to offer a different perspective.
When we love and lose more than once, we get better at it. If this is something you absolutely don’t want to improve upon, you are not alone. Neither did I. But the truth of the matter is that loving someone and losing them is not just a horrible experience—it’s also an incredible opportunity. There are so many lessons tied up inside of that struggle, if we can just see our way clear to untangling them.
Of course, in those first days, weeks, or even months after our hearts are broken, we might find it difficult to see any bright side. We’re too busy trying to keep ourselves together just enough to get through to the end of the day when we can at least lie down even if we’re unable to sleep. But as we begin to heal, we have the opportunity to make a choice about how we’re going to proceed.
There seem to be a few schools of thought on how to go about this. Some choose to shut down, guarding their hearts and making sure that no one else can hurt them that way again. Others choose to switch to only casual relationships, without the intimacy and entanglement of committed relationships. Still others decide to take a break, focusing their time on personal growth and development. Then there are those who do decide to open up their hearts wider.
This last group is able to take the good experiences of the last relationship and keep those memories intact. They make peace with the difficult memories. They move on with open hearts, giving love yet another chance. If this group seems foolhardy, I can easily say that they do probably experience more heartache than any of the other groups.
But they likely also experience more joy, more love, and more connection than the group that shuts themselves down or the ones who decide to just have casual flings rather than connecting on a deeper level. Those who take a break will likely choose one of the other states once the break is done, some moving to the open heart option.
In my experience, taking a break and then moving ahead with an open heart may be the best decision we can make. It allows us to address the baggage from the past relationship, spend time processing our feelings, and then gives us the opportunity to move ahead to forge new connections without making the same mistakes. It’s an opportunity and a learning experience, even if it’s not an enjoyable one.
While both men and women tend to choose one of these options in addressing heartache, it seems that our society encourages women to spend more time processing their feelings and working on themselves. Men seem to be encouraged simply to move on to the next relationship or to act out with high-risk behaviors, including drowning their sorrows in alcohol or participating in casual sex. While these behaviors exist regardless of gender, there seems to be a socially-acceptable way for men and women to grieve—a standard that doesn’t allow much room for men to experience their emotions or process them.
But I’m the last person to ever encourage following convention for convention’s sake. It seems to me that the choices we make in how we deal with heartache can impact our future relationships. Mark Manson, author of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”, discusses how our perception of our circumstances impacts our choices. There’s a difference between blame and responsibility, he explains. We may not be the one to blame for a situation happening, but we certainly have to take responsibility for its outcome in our lives.
Separating the blame from the responsibility helps us move ahead without expecting others to magically fix our problems. It also helps us move forward without shouldering guilt and shame about things that happened outside of our control. Once we see that we are responsible for living our lives, we can make choices about how those lives will look. We can blame someone for breaking our hearts, but we still have to pick up the pieces and move forward.
At the beginning of our experience of love and loss, we first have to move through that experience. We can’t avoid the suffering, much as we might try—at least not without prolonging it. Once we’ve allowed ourselves to move through the heartache, we can begin to put our lives back together, slowly rebuilding it, absent of the one we once included as an integral part of our daily existence. This is an opportunity to focus on what we enjoy and how we want to fill our time.
Next, we can choose whether we’ll open ourselves up to future relationships or shut down. We can decide whether we’ll engage in casual relationships or spend a little more time with ourselves. We can ignore what everyone else says is the right thing for us to do and figure out instead what feels right for us. Then we need to do that. We can separate blame and responsibility and then decide how we’ll proceed from there.
The truth is that we’ll likely experience love and loss more than once in our lives. Yes, we’ll get better at it. No, it never gets more enjoyable. But we do get stronger. We do learn not to make those same mistakes again.
And if we’re very lucky, we’ll find a way to keep all of the love we’ve experienced, and forgive all the rest.
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This post was originally published on medium.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Getty Images