As most of you already know, I’m a tarot reader. I spend a LOT of time talking to people about relationships. And there’s a couple things that they think that I find tragically mistaken.
The first is that there’s no use in a relationship that doesn’t last forever.
The second is that a broken heart is to be avoided at all costs.
Which, I suppose, sound sensible at first, but they really aren’t. There are a lot of very good reasons to go into a relationship that is temporary and to risk getting hurt.
Relationships are not just Facebook statuses to be changed out as time passes. Relationships are an extremely close examination of another person and, hopefully, a reflection on yourself. You learn what it’s like to see the world through a different set of eyes – and it becomes an entirely new world. And when your world has changed, so, too, have you.
Our relationships – all of them – parents, siblings, friends, cousins, lovers, coworkers, boss, teacher, stranger – shape who we are. Sometimes we get to choose how we are changed, but often times we don’t. We grow by meeting all these people and exchanging our energy with them. And, hopefully, over the course of the relationship, you come up with some beautiful memories to look back on later.
So, with all this changing that we’re doing all the time, who we are now is not going to be the same person who meets our life partners. And that’s good – because you need to make the journey to that new person in order to have a successful relationship with them. And if you met them now, there’s probably a good chance that you wouldn’t even like each other.
Think of all these relationships that have “failed” as experiences that help mold you into the person you need to become, like water over a stone.
And then with heart break – it hasn’t killed us yet, has it? We experience heart breaks in so many different forms. Small ones, when the diner is out of milk shakes, and large ones, when we lose someone we love.
This is the way I view it – all the good stuff that happens before the heart break is worth the heart break itself – if it was not, we wouldn’t care. Heart break just means that something really beautiful happened in your life and for whatever reason, it has stopped. But all that came before? Beauty. The process of grieving what is now gone? Also beauty.
Not to sound like a 18th century poet, but the amount of grief and loss we feel is a testimony to how deeply we felt and loved. As such, it can be nothing other than pure beauty.
It’s almost like watching a good movie. You know the movie is going to end, and then there will be no more, but you watch it because the experience will be a good one. Think of that only on a much bigger and more meaningful scale. It’s kind of like that.
Grief is testimony to how important something was to us.
When my dad was getting ready to meet his now ex-wife, he asked me if it was a good idea. And I asked him what he had to lose? A broken heart? He’s survived that plenty of times before and, if necessary, he would do so again.
I was no older than 18 when that happened – and I still fully support my advice to him.
