Just broke up? Here’s how to love again
Even the sweetest ‘It Couple’ I knew who had weathered the ups and downs of life didn’t last. What does this mean for the rest of us?
A friend recently announced that his marriage was over. He and his wife had been together for 8 years, married for 2, and had been through life-threatening medical conditions and family loss.
However, his wife’s career progressed over time, and they found themselves in a marriage where their expectations were no longer complementary.
Their situation isn’t unique. On a macroeconomic level, there was a steep rise in divorces throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as women started entering the workforce. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers credit this to the post-war era, where couples who were probably a good match before the war ended up being incompatible after times had changed.
Macroeconomic statistics aside, when we look at marriages and divorce rates, we’re actually asking a deeper, profound question: “Will my relationship last?”
Even the sweetest couples may not last the test of time. As the saying goes, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. We all set out to form relationships that last. We make marriage vows proclaiming our depth of love and commitment to one another. But accidents and misfortune may still happen, and the best couples may still end up going their separate ways.
Does this mean that it is pointless to love at all? Should we avoid relationships and strive to be comfortable by ourselves, since even emotions fade and people eventually leave?
The answer, is a resounding no.
The only constant in life is change. In the journey of life, you will meet and love different people with different intensity, in different ways.
But each time, you will also discover and learn new lessons. When you fall in love, you learn how to love another person selflessly. When you fall out of love, you will learn how to turn that same love toward yourself. Therefore, love is never lost, just transformed.
The only constant in life is change. So, Love is never lost, just transformed.
If you had never opened your heart fully to love openly, you would not have experienced all its wondrousness. So do not cease being vulnerable; do not avoid the troubles of loss, but continue to leap in, to embrace and accept the emotions, desires, thoughts and feelings that follow with love.
The Karmapa spiritual leader of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism shared his observations about love:
“I have observed a strange idea of love that many people seem to have: they see love as a kind of gift that has to be given back. … But love doesn’t always have to be reciprocated. We can just love. If love does not come back to you, it is still love that you give and you feel”.
Although it is cliché, love is what that keeps Man alive. Victor Frankl realises in surviving the atrocious sufferings of Nazi death camps, that:
“Those who have a “why” to live, can live through any “how”… For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.
The truth — that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
But don’t over-glorify the past of being together. There’s a reason why the chapter ended.
Yes, it is better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all. More importantly, you have to learn from that experience.
Remember why you failed, so you can love healthily or even, be loved healthily. Appreciate the journey and be grateful for all that you have learnt and experienced, not just the richness and joys, but the agonies too.
Do not pine for a loss. Take the heart-wrenching musical love story La La Land as a reminder — that it is pointless for Sebastien (starring as Ryan Gosling) to hold on to broken promises and the past, when Mia (Emma Stone) had moved on with her life.
The goal for relationships is interdependence — not dependence, where you are worried about abandonment and stick too closely; not the other extreme, of being afraid that someone will get too close — but appreciation for one another, while being comfortably secure in your Self.
Conclusion
Viktor Frankl describes his clarity of the purpose of life, after surviving Nazi death camps; that life is not a quest for pleasure for it fades, or for power, for it doesn’t last, but for meaning, other than oneself. He defines three possible sources of Meaning: in Work, in Love and in Courage during difficult times; where:
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing — your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”
You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you feel and do about what happens to you.
Macroeconomic factors such as the rise of female employment may drive socio-behavioural outcomes such as divorce; outcomes that look obvious in hindsight.
However, we cannot predict what will happen in the future. What we can do now, is to focus on the present, to love fully when love comes, and accept it when it ends.
