At different points in my life, I must have spent a total of five years thinking about this one question. Of course, those moments come when you are losing someone or they are losing you. What I realized only recently though is that I am thinking about them even when I am not being lost or losing.
We all, or at least most of us, at some point, think we have found their person. The one who makes us better than who we were before, not because they complete us, but because they make us want to be the best we can be. People who come into our lives and impact us in ways we never imagined.
So, what then, after we experience this person, do we do when they are no longer with us? How do we replace them in our lives? How do we realize that there are others for us and we need to move on?
You see, here is the hardest part; when you feel like you have loved someone that is unlike any other you will ever meet, you remove a part of every person you have yet to meet. You will forever compare the people in your life to some element of what you felt was “perfect”.
What if the issue you have when you meet amazing people and cannot connect with them is the same shade of that feeling? What if the people you come in contact with are amazing, but the shade is still with you? I think about my first love all the time. I knew her when I was a kid and whilst we tried to be together as adults, it never worked. I recall the last time we spoke face to face about it, I was married and she wanted me to come and be with her. I just had my first child and I honestly loved my wife. No way I was blowing that life up for someone who never, up until this moment, fought for me, but I think about her to this day. I always have.
I met my wife after the love of my life and I broke up. It was kinda easy. I am not really sure why or how it was, but it was. I was taken by her in so many ways. I miss that person. That person left my life many years before the physical being that was my wife, did. I got past my love, but what if I couldn’t? Would I be able to give my heart to another?
Now that I am older and divorced, I had the luck of falling in love with someone basically just after my ex-wife and I broke up. I fell hard. She was all the things described above, with the added benefit of her not feeling them. Once that relationship ended, I was faced with trying to figure out how to love again. I cannot tell you the answer because I still have no idea. After her, I made mistakes, made great decisions, and came to be with amazing people. One helped me get through what I can now say was the hardest time in my life, but getting involved in a long term thing with anyone after all that seems harder this time.
Perhaps that is why we find it hard to marry a second or third time as people. The divorce rates go up for each marriage and I realize that, for me, I will have a hard time getting to the alter again. This is not because I am hung up on someone, more like I am hung up on not wanting to have what occurred in the past happen again. I love differently now and I think I always will. How unfair is that for people who enter our lives after “the one”?
Love is something us humans seem to need. I love being with someone and I have done it really really well and I have massively sucked at it, but one thing for sure, I love doing it. What concerns me the most though is that I love now based on what I experienced in the past and if the person I am trying to love has not had that type of heartbreak, will they receive it the same way?
Are those that have been broken able to love those that have not?
In the immortal words of Thomas Shelby, “You cannot break what has been broken. You cannot even repair it to break it again, so go for it. Try to love me”.
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This post was previously published on Hello, Love and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Unsplash