The Beautiful Thing About Heartbreak
Most of us are no strangers to heartbreak. We have to go through different experiences in life that force us to fall apart every now and then. When it comes to love, we learn how it feels to have it and lose it. If it’s the heartbreaking kind of love, then we know what it’s like to constantly question our self-worth and our ability to truly give our hearts away to someone. We know what it means to feel completely alone in a relationship that we believe should be adding value to our lives. The heartbreaking kind of love may drive us to jealousy in certain situations because we completely put our trust in someone, only to have them betray it by being unfaithful. In turn, maybe we are made to feel like we’re crazy for making accusations when our intuition always proves to be right.
Some of us may not know what a real, genuine kind of love is like because we’ve only ever been exposed to the hard, heartbreaking kind of love. The messy kind of love that is full of dysfunction, toxicity, and chaos. Maybe some of us learned this early on from witnessing a marriage fall apart due to unfaithfulness and it’s a cycle that we have promised ourselves to never repeat in the future. We realize that we subconsciously fear the things that broke us in our pasts because we don’t want to experience that pain again. It’s why we try so hard not to repeat the things that we’ve already gone through.
However, the harder we try to prevent something from happening again in our lives, the more likely the chances are that it will occur. If we don’t take the time to address the underlying traumas when they need to be addressed, then the internal emotional issues will remain and be carried into our relationships moving forward. When we’ve been exposed to toxic love in our pasts, it is very likely that we may find ourselves in a relationship that we’ve convinced ourselves is good for us, even though we know deep down it is not. The warning signs might be there all along, but they are ignored. We grow accustomed to the dysfunction because we don’t know how to exist without it.
Our mistake here is that we end up falling in love with the highest potential of someone, and we convince ourselves that someday they’ll reach that potential. We will only end up disappointed in the end when they don’t live up to the unrealistic expectations we’ve held them to in our heads. We may stay because we feel like we could be the one to save the other person and to help them become the person that we believe them to be. In doing so, we lose ourselves. We lose ourselves because we give every part of our beings to the other person. We place our hearts, self-worth, and love in the other person’s hands, and we trust them to care for all of it well. And maybe they do for awhile, until they don’t anymore.
Some of the greatest relationships don’t always end abruptly. Sometimes it’s a gradual unraveling of all the things that we cannot bring ourselves to talk about when they need to be talked about. The avoidance ultimately becomes the undoing. Two people can only take so much until they just can’t handle any more. There comes a point when they both realize that they are no longer the same two people that fell in love with each other earlier on in their lives.
Love isn’t always an easy thing. It’s not meant to be. It isn’t always effortless, and it can be incredibly heartbreaking. However, each heartbreak will bring us one step closer to the right love that is meant for us. The real, true kind of love is two people always choosing each other, no matter what. No matter how messy things get, no matter how much the other person may drive us crazy, we choose them to stand by our side as our partner through life. Through the good, the bad, and the ugly.
We choose them because they bring out a light in our eyes that we forgot existed. We choose them because they encourage us to be better everyday and we genuinely enjoy their company, even in the simplest moments of just sitting in silence. We choose them because they add value to our lives. We choose them because we love them and we want to grow together, learn together, and take on the world together. We choose them because they finally make us realize why we had to go through all the wrong, heartbreaking kinds of love to finally understand how it feels to have the real, genuine kind of love.
If we go through life without ever experiencing heartbreak, then we can’t truly understand the value of the lessons in our lives. We don’t understand what it means to be broken, to pick up the pieces, and to rise above the ashes. Heartbreak is necessary to teach us what it means to truly love and be loved in return. It shows us our courage and our strength. It introduces us to a new part of ourselves that we didn’t even know existed. And although each heartbreak may take little pieces of us along the way, our hearts will gradually open back up in time to let the light back in. The light we once thought was extinguished by the person we believed held our entire world.
And then, one day, we may find ourselves sitting across the table, sipping on our morning coffee, looking at the very reason why every heartbreak before was absolutely worth it.