Everyone wants to believe in a fairy tale love, that things will work out if they’re meant to be. We’ve all heard some variation of the phrase, “If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours.” We’re meant to believe that if things are meant to be that they will happen and they will always work out.
But that’s not how life works and that’s not how love works.
The first guy I ever loved recently got engaged to the girl he started talking to after me. My ex that I swore I would marry now has a house with his girlfriend. The guy who most recently had my heart is now in the military.
And I’m still alone.
Usually things don’t work out just because you want them to.
Love doesn’t trump all like we hope it does. There are so many other obstacles in life that can stand in the way of you and your ‘forever person’ because at one point I thought all those people would be my ‘forever person’ and I was wrong.
Between all the love we shared we didn’t connect somewhere. We weren’t on each other’s wavelengths and no amount of love can change that. No amount of love can change your dreams or where your heart might be at because my heart was across the world and my exes heart was in our hometown. I wanted to go and he wanted to stay.
You can want each other desperately but that doesn’t always mean you’ll end up together.
It wouldn’t be fair for me to ask him to leave what he was doing behind to come and it wouldn’t be fair for him to ask me to stay. And somewhere along the road of us choosing our own paths he found new love, better love. Love that worked for him and love that makes him happy.
Sometimes you just have to let them go and move on because you can’t change someone’s dreams and you can’t manipulate your own to make them happy. That’s selfish and love isn’t selfish. Love is about making sacrifices but you can only sacrifice so much before you wind up resenting each other and becoming unhappy together.
You can love someone with every fiber in your being, you can miss them terribly and desperately want to reach out to them but you can’t stop them from moving forward with their life while you move forward with yours, too.
I can’t help that when I came home things were different and that I no longer knew that man I once loved. I can’t change that. It’s just something you have to learn to accept and live with when life draws you apart.
It’s something you have to realize that you made a sacrifice for.
Love doesn’t trump all, if it did I wouldn’t have deeply cared about more than one person and I’d still be there with him, but I’m not.
Sometimes we don’t end up with our ‘forever person’ because life has a greater plan in place for us. We aren’t done learning, we aren’t done falling, we aren’t done working on ourselves. Whatever it is, there is something else out there for us.
It might not make sense right now, you still might feel that deep sting in your heart and a lump you can’t swallow in your throat but there’s a reason you didn’t end up with your ‘forever person’ you just have to believe it will work out another way.
Sometimes love doesn’t trump all and there’s nothing you can do to change that except to keep believing in something greater. 
