What I Learned About Love from One Divorce and One Near-Engagement
For most of my life, I saw romantic love not as something that happened when two people fancied each other, but as a goal I not only could, but should, pursue.
The love I was after was of the forever kind, the kind that leads to a ring on your finger and a partner by your side until you die.
So I met a great guy, and I thought we got along well enough, and I bought into the bigger picture of home and family he painted before my impressionable eyes, at the same time as I ignored how incompatible the fine detailing I wanted to give that picture was from his. We got married.
It turned out we were meant to not last forever, and I found myself divorced before I was even 30 years old.
Enter the next guy, the exact opposite of the first guy in many ways. He was a lot more like me. We shared dreams and anxieties, as well as aspirations and fears. Our relationship seemed perfect. Light and easy.
We started to talk marriage, and once again I could see that beautiful picture of home and family, but this time, I was truly in luck: the picture seemed even clearer. This time, everything would turn out right.
It all seemed to be working as it should. He even bought me a ring, but when the time came, he couldn’t bring himself to propose. Something was off, and we both felt it. Our respective guts were sending us a clear message: stop. Turn around. Walk away.
Which is exactly what we did.
The breakup was maturely handled and friendly, although it was as painful as anyone would expect. I cried. He cried. And we both mourned the loss of a dream that, for a while, we dreamed together.
From my divorce and my near-engagement, however, I drew the biggest lessons on love I had never even thought I needed to learn. I thought I understood love when I set myself to find it in my early twenties, but oh, how wrong I was.
Now, I’m happy to report I know better.
It’s easy to think you understand self-love, and to believe you have plenty of it, until you find yourself in desperate need only to discover you’re actually in short supply.
Self-love means you put yourself in a position to stand your ground. It means you prize your mental health above all else, and you’re not afraid of being alone.
Self-love is also the foundation of any healthy relationship, since it’s only once you love yourself enough that you can adequately love someone else without generating codependence. It took me a great deal of time and self-reflection to realize how codependent my relationship with my ex-husband actually was, but once I learned to see the signs, I finally felt empowered enough to not let something like that happen to me ever again.
I have always been a daydreamer. I would spend hours with my head in the clouds, coming up with amazing stories of which I was always the protagonist. Intricate plots, sometimes magical, sometimes realistic, but always more interesting than reality, would dominate my thinking.
When I met each of my exes, I included them in my daydreaming. I dreamed of the life we were going to live, and the family we would create, all in meticulous detail. Whenever things didn’t happen like I had imagined, I would feel personally wronged. It was twice as hard for me to deal with reality, because I had been out of practice for so long.
It wasn’t until I started to spend more time focused on reality than on the stories I made up for myself that I started to feel truly alive. Daydreaming can be fun, but when it comes to love, it’s mostly useless, because daydreaming doesn’t prepare you for the freewill of those around you.
Real life people don’t follow the script you’ve created in your head. They don’t say the things you would like to hear, they don’t make the decisions you would like them to make, they don’t understand what’s going on in your mind just by looking at you, as you would like them to do.
When it comes to love, daydreaming can block the sight of all the red flags you should be able to see otherwise. It can also prevent you from seeing your own actions and motivations clearly, and that’s when you hurt your loved ones the most.
Daydreaming can also set your relationship to impossibly high standards, fairytale standards, fit only for fiction, not for real life — and that’s self-sabotage at its finest.
Love shouldn’t depend on your daydreaming to seem beautiful, to seem right. Love should make you want to stay in reality 100% of the time, and never run away from it, even if your hiding place is your own mind.
The two most significant relationships of my life may have ended in pain, but they were both beautiful at some point. My marriage may have dragged on for years like a wounded zombie, causing me to feel a mixture of anxiety and despair on an almost daily basis, but even that relationship had its positive highlights, especially early on.
Just because those relationships ended, it doesn’t mean the love wasn’t, at least at some point, real.
The idea we each have only one person we truly love in a lifetime — The One, or our other half, or whatever you want to call it — is less than accurate. Our capacity for love is just as finite as we set it to be, and if we stay open to love, we’ll find it again, no matter how many times we’ve lost it before.
I’m not ashamed of any of my choices, neither the choice of entering a marriage or a new relationship, nor the choice to ask for a divorce or walk away from an impending engagement.
To this day, in certain social settings, I have to hear the occasional commentary of how “things aren’t the same as they used to be,” and how “people these days give up on marriages just like that,” or how “no one takes commitment seriously anymore.” And I have to sit there, quietly, because a) the people behind these comments know of my situation and are trying to entice a response, but I’m not about to fall for it and give anyone the satisfaction; and b) I’m secure enough about my choices to not feel like I owe every Tom, Dick and Harry an explanation — even if some of these people are “family.”
I’m not ashamed to have loved, and not ashamed to admit that that love wasn’t enough to carry me and my then partner to the finish line. I’m living my life the best way I know how, and if that bothers anyone, that’s their problem, not mine.
There’s something comforting in finding a life partner, or at least in believing you have found one. I thought I had found a great life partner twice: when I got married; and when my ex-boyfriend and I started to discuss our future life together, which we did in detail.
Having a life partner assures you you won’t have to go it alone; you will have someone to share both happiness and pain, both bliss and struggle. There’s a difference, however, in wanting someone to share your life with, and waiting for someone to show up so that you can start living the life you want.
For too long I’ve waited to have a partner so I could go after what I wanted in life. Although some of my goals, such as having a family, did require a partner, most of them didn’t. Still, I acted as if I couldn’t get any of the things I wanted out of life by myself, which is not true.
If I’d like to have a house with a yard and a dog, then it’s up to me to give myself those things. I don’t even need a partner to have children, I can work hard and put myself in a comfortable enough position to adopt. In short, it makes no sense to put my life plans on hold for want of a partner, because if I do, then I might either settle for a lesser partner just to get the ball rolling, or forever remain in stand-by. Waiting. Never accomplishing anything.
Never accomplishing anything is completely out of the question for me now.
The biggest lesson of them all: I am enough.
Feeling like you’re enough relates to cultivating self-love, but it deserves its own moment in the spotlight. It deserves to be reinforced.
After a divorce and essentially a cancelled engagement, self-doubt started to creep in. I felt unworthy, wrong, incomplete. By understanding that I am enough, I am able to focus on self-improvement. I am able to separate the valuable lessons from the unreasonable waves of guilt. I am able to focus on becoming an independent, complete person, capable of becoming a valuable equal partner to someone, someday, instead of a codependent wimp.
Being enough sets me free to live my own adventures, and to not set my self-worth to whatever my relationships status is at the moment.
Love shouldn’t be taken for granted. If loving ourselves sometimes proves to be difficult, how can we expect to always love and be loved by others?
I have learned that romantic love may not be a permanent fixture of my life, and that’s ok. I have plenty of self-love to cultivate, not to mention my love for family and friends, and the love I have for my work and my projects.
Romantic love may not last forever, but my love for life will never die.
Related:
What I Learned About Love from One Divorce and One Near-Engagement
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