Love/Relationships
Having Your Heart Broken Could Be The Best Thing That Ever Happens To You
Learning to let love — be love.
Tales of the broken-hearted seem endless throughout history. Lamenting the loss of a lover is a deliciously tragic trademark in poetry, books, film, and all variations of artistic mediums.
Many of us brood over how we shouldn’t have fallen in love with who we ultimately fell in love with or how a painful broken heart could have been avoided if we’d only seen all the ‘red flags’ along the way.
Yet, in all of this decidedly horrendous heartache, there lies a sobering reality:
Falling in love and experiencing the loss of a relationship is sometimes the only way we can learn some of life’s most valuable lessons.
It’s part of how people eventually evolve into improved states of self both in life and within relationships.
Fine-tuning the ability to let things go and beginning to comprehend why we make the choices we do in relationships is probably one of the most valuable of all the lessons that can be learned from a catastrophic heartbreak.
Having your heart broken is actually an important tool to help guide you toward developing improved coping mechanisms in order to sustain future relationships that may be better suited to both your personality and your lifestyle.
You can never take back falling in love. But you can certainly learn from it.
Additionally, vital lessons can also be learned by staying in a relationship that’s not working. The pattern of beating a dead relationship horse is something many of us carry around — and until we learn how to stop beating that dead horse we can’t move on to the next relationship challenge.
Not wanting to give up on a relationship out of fear, stubbornness, confusion, or loneliness is common. Many of us have experienced this. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
The biggest mistakes I have made in love had everything to do with my own inability to let go of relationships that were toxic. My choice to hang on to negative relationships that were slowly rotting from the inside was my Achilles heel for a very long time.
It was never the love I had for my partners that ultimately broke my heart. It was the dynamics of how those relationships functioned — or didn’t function.
It was often a lack of experience, maturity, and wisdom on one or both sides that ultimately killed my relationship connections. I often picked the wrong partners because I didn’t know any better — YET.
Love often gets a bad name in the realm of relationships and we frequently relish giving it that bad name. We tend to blame love for all of our relationship woes when, in fact, love is just being love.
How we, as individuals, decide to process and express our feelings when we fall in love is the real meat on the bones of a relationship.
My sharpest mistakes have been tolerating bad behavior, making excuses for people who don’t take accountability for their own actions, and selling myself short as far as my own personal worth.
Sometimes our biggest mistakes in love are only measured by our readiness and capability to both give and receive it.
How we react to falling in love can be unpredictable. Every person has a different way of responding to it. Not everyone is able to make a relationship last for a substantial amount of time. Not everyone finds a partner who accepts and cares for them in a healthy way. Not everyone has good experiences in love.
Romantic relationships can be delicate and they take considerable effort to maintain. We all make mistakes. Making them when we fall in love is par for the course. Learning from those mistakes is necessary for our growth as human beings.
Trying not to be too harsh on love itself can be a challenge because it can hurt SO damn much sometimes.
Ultimately, love is a gift. It’s one we can learn many lessons from if we have the courage to allow ourselves to fall into it and then potentially also be damaged by it.
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