What are love songs usually written about? Off the top of the head we can say the two most general or common themes are of love found and love lost. In fact, not only love songs, but stories, tv shows, movies, and all sorts of media focus on either one of these two ideas. It goes without saying that romantic relationships are one of the most defining experiences in our lives and in human history, imprinted in our minds and our hearts by either one of these qualities: what we found, or what we lost.
You seldom hear about about the good parts of love, though. Ever notice how your friends always talk about their relationships when things are going badly, not when things are good and stable? Maybe it’s a “No news is good news” type of thing, or, perhaps people don’t want to come off as humblebrags. Either way, it seems to be that breakups, regrets, and the inherent lessons in them are what we talk about the most and leave us with the most indelible impressions when it comes to our love lives.
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Breakups Are a Path Towards Growth
Think about all the great art that’s come out of breakups, heartache, and love lost. It can’t be all bad! But in all seriousness, breakups are good for growth and good for the soul. It can serve as an emotional catharsis, allowing us to finally let out those emotions we’ve been holding in, or let go of that relationship that has been doing us more harm than good. Breakups allow the truth to finally surface, whether it be your own truth, or the truth of others and how they feel about your relationship.
Rise from the Ashes
But no matter what caused the breakup, or how it went down, or how well it went, or how ugly it got, an ended relationship brings about a “Phoenix effect”: the end of something old so that something new, and better, can be reborn. There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. And there’s always something better that results from it. Either you will be reborn with the wisdom gained from the experience. Or, maybe your relationship will be reborn into something more evolved and more fruitful after you and your partner learned the hard and necessary lessons.
What You Make Of It
In the end, it’s all about perspective. It is what you make of it. There’s a reason why these expressions have lasted as long as they have. And we as a culture have taken the universal ideas behind them for granted. But, it’s true! It really is what you make of it. And if you experience a breakup as a negative in your life, only then will it begin to manifest as a true problem. Viewed through this lens, a breakup can paralyze you and your growth in its tracks, making you only focus on the bad stuff or the things you wish you could have done differently. This pain in turn leads to a feeling of regret that often leaves us playing the role of and feeling like the victim. When we play the victim, we surrender our agency because we approach our experience as something that happened to us, instead of it being something we were complicit in. And when it happens to us, as opposed to for us, we learn nothing.
Regret Not
In that sense, we will eventually have no choice but to appreciate the breakup if we truly want to become better. We can not regret it, regret the time and effort invested, or wish it never happened. At the risk of sounding cliché, regrets are a part of life and the important thing that people forget, or simply never learn, is that we cannot judge our regret or experiences. It is what it is. And we cannot judge our own regret because it then becomes too easy to attach a negative sentiment to it and consequently make it harder for us to let go of that past. It’s best we acknowledge it but not live our lives in it or in relation to it, lest we let the present pass us by, and leave us unprepared for the future.
There’s always a lesson to be learned in our breakups and the regret that inevitably soon follows. And those lessons are usually some of the most formative ones in our lives. We miss out on the growth of the experience if we keep replaying our past in our minds in the hopes that something about it will change (hint: it won’t). Perhaps we can regret that we’ve attached negative sentiments to our experience and become unappreciative of the lesson it has taught us. However, once we acknowledge the experience, and then accept it for what it is, we might realize that we may not regret our breakup at all, in whatever way it transpired. As Steve Jobs said in his commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford, “You can only connect the dots looking backwards.” That’s really and truly all we can do.
That means you cannot rewrite history but you can learn from the past and take action to make sure you move forward.
I want to ask you a question because there are 2 big turning points every woman experiences in her relationships with men and they determine if you end up in a happy relationship or if it all ends in heartbreak.
So pay attention because the next step to take is vitally important. At some point he’s going to ask himself if you are the woman he wants to commit himself to for the long term…
Do you know how men determine if a woman is girlfriend material (the type of woman he commits himself to) or if he sees you as just a fling? If not, you need to read this next: The #1 Thing Men Desire In A Woman…
And the second big problem many women face: Do you feel he might be losing interest, going cold emotionally or pulling away? If so, then you need to read this right now or risk losing him forever: If He’s Pulling Away, Do This…
Coach Steven
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