Three weeks ago Joe and I celebrated the first anniversary of our engagement as well as being together for half a decade!
5 years on… and I truthfully cannot believe that I am still in a relationship with someone who makes me feel loved, strong, supported and challenged… You might think that after 5 years of being in a strong relationship that its an odd feeling to still feel as if you cannot believe that it is still going… but the truth is that there was a time where without me really realising I was shutting myself off from any deep committed relationships with people and not just men, after several heartbreaks, lost friendships and loosing my mum. I opted to enjoy life within certain boundaries of happiness that I could control, as this in turn allowed me to have more control over the level of sadness in my life. Choosing to live more of a life which embraced numbness rather than feeling…
Reflecting back on our relationship over the past five years, it made me think more about who I was when I entered into the relationship, my attitude towards relationships, at the time/ as a teen/ my mid 20s and how I feel about relationships now.
Fairytale Vs. Reality – What is love?
Without even realising, we as young girls are submerged into representations of what is ‘love’ as soon as we watch our first Disney movie. In fact, Disney movies and Fairytales, don’t only give us our first representation of ‘love’ but the movies depict the story of what is a ‘great love’ and hereon here lies the first obstacle that we will inevitably set for ourselves.
It is at this point that we as young girls, now believe that there is a Prince Charming out there waiting for us, as soon as we become an adult. Not only that, we now believe we will be able to find him by either ‘letting our long hair fall out of the window of our house’ (Rapunzel); ‘under the spell from a witch, rising from a deep sleep by a kiss from our Prince’ (Sleeping Beauty); or just plain ‘attending a Party/Ball and dancing with a Prince and leaving your shoe behind’ (Cinderella). Now, I have left my shoe behind in a taxi before and I can attest to the fact that no Prince Charming turned up on my door step the following day! Just a hangover and feeling of regret for loosing my beloved shoe!
Unfortunately, as we all know, for the majority of us, finding Prince Charming really is not that simple. The reality is, we may think that we have found Prince Charming, more than once, with our Prince letting us down in one of many ways. Finding themselves another Princess; ending the relationship without warning or maybe your so called Prince just didn’t turn up for that second or third date.
I’m sure us women could write a long long book on all the different ways our Mr. Right has indeed been Mr. Wrong, but the truth is finding our Mr. Right, takes time, experience, heartbreak and research. Most importantly we ‘ourselves’ need to grow and deeply learn about ourselves first, before really being able to choose the right person that we can trust to hold our heart, with just the right amount of grip. Not too little that they will eventually let us go, but not too tight to allow our heart to continue to beat to the rhythm of our own body and life – allowing us to grow and continue to be in control of our own life.
Heartbreak
‘Heartbreak’: the feeling of overwhelming distress. Heartbreak is a feeling that I am sure that I will never ever get used to. Each time, it feels as if its the first time you have ever felt it. Having experienced strong feelings of grief alongside heartbreak, it is an emotion that I have never been able to manage or shut out.
That being said, even though heartbreak at various points of my life has brought me severe sadness, its something that I do not regret – as I have learnt so much from these experiences. When you are going through the heartbreak, it allows you to reassess the situation (often a 100 times over!), working out what went wrong, why it ended and if there is anything else you could have done. Often, you won’t always be able to find all the answers to your questions, but its often in the quest for these answers, that you will find understanding and begin to learn more about yourself. What you were and are not happy with, as well as what you are and are not willing to allow to be a part of your life.
Ultimately, like anything in life, it is always good to look face on at the negatives/sad things involved in your heartbreak and then try and find a way to weave them into something positive, that allows you to move forward from your present situation. This doesn’t mean that your heartbreak is automatically over and passes (because for me that was never the case), but it means that by looking at the positives you can slowly begin to move forward, step-by-step each day, making the ‘load’ of your heartbreak a little easier to manage day-to-day. Ultimately, there is always something better out there for you that won’t bring you as much sadness, especially if you take what you can from the experiences of life.
Look at your previous relationship, like you would when you have completed a project at work or an essay and ask yourself questions about the relationship:
- What made you feel good?
- What did you treasure the most from the companionship?
- What did you not like?
- How did that person make you feel?
Then ask yourself the questions:
- What do you want from a partner for the duration of your life and not just in the short-term?
- How would you like to be treated?
- What type of person are you striving to be, does the person you are seeking complement the person you are aiming to be?
- Morally what are the traits you would like to have in a partner?
- What is type of person would you like to be a parent to your children?
Once you have solid answers for these questions, then it would help you later on in life when meeting other people. Sure, the answers to the above may change over time and as you grow as a person, but fundamentally, the answers will serve as good guidelines for when meeting other people. The added with the experience of your heartbreak, will help you keep away from those people who ultimately won’t ever be able to give you what you require and can hopefully prevent future heartbreak.
Who are you?
Something I came to learn slowly around the age of 28, was that I needed to know who ‘I am’, who ‘I want to be’ and what ‘I do not want to be a part of my life’, before I really was in a position to truly meet a lifelong partner who would be good for me. The saying, ‘with age, comes wisdom’ couldn’t ring truer for me… An understanding of who you are, your worth, what you bring to life and to a relationship, is important, as it allows yourself to understand your self-worth as well as to think about what you may be over-demanding or under-demanding from another person in a relationship.
The journey of understanding who you are, is not a short journey, nor is it a journey that I think ever ends, as we are constantly evolving, based on our circumstances, the people we meet along the way and the obstacles we face. For me, I learnt more about myself, when I was living on my own, travelling for work and strangely, when I took up going for runs outside, it was in the moments of forced introspection, where I had no-one else to converse with/distract myself, that I could slowly come to understand, who I was, what I wanted for myself and what I wanted for my future children. Slowly, I started to devise a plan on how I could work on myself and also work towards to providing all that I needed on my own. Through heartache, grief and age, I chose to start believing in myself, to be less critical and kinder to myself as well as being my own support network, depending on myself to provide all that I needed for myself.
Loving yourself
The most powerful gift to yourself you could ever give to yourself, is to love yourself. I don’t mean in the ‘vain’ love yourself kind of way, what I mean is, learn to love ALL parts of you – the good and the bad. Learn who you are, why you are like you are and embrace it. Any change you wish to effect on yourself, do it because you wish to evolve as a person and not because you negatively don’t like that part of you. Be kind to yourself and less critical – you are human, you are not perfect and being not perfect is all part of being human and equally what makes you, you. I found that once I began to learn to love myself, that it allowed me to be in a position to be ‘loved right back’. The difference here was, through learning to love myself, I was able to make sure that I was ‘loved right back’ – in the right way, which made it easier to identify those that were there to only show me love in the wrong way and would ultimately end up bringing the wrong type of love or actions into my life.
Letting someone else in…
Now that you have worked on ‘who you are’, developed your own independence and learnt to love yourself, ‘letting someone in’ to your carefully curated bubble is now one of the hardest next steps to do. For me, this really was the toughest part. I still stand by the thought process that you should be careful about who you choose to fully let into your life, as essentially, you are letting that person see the most vulnerable part of you, your heart and mind.
The person you choose to allow access to the most vulnerable parts of you, should respect who ‘you are’ as well as champion ‘you’, support ‘you’ as well as challenge ‘you’, bringing the best out of you. They should never use this ‘secret access’ to your vulnerability against you or for manipulation. Often, early on in the relationship, you will be able to spot signs to see if they champion ‘you’ or do the opposite, so be observant of this and trust your instincts. It doesn’t happen over night, but anything worth having, takes time, even if your gut tells you to let that person in, time will always allow you to be the best of judge.
However, that being said… when you find someone to let in, that you can truly trust, after all the work you have done on yourself and the heartache that you have been through… it really is a beautiful thing. Finding the one, makes all the experiences of the past make sense, it makes everything worth it. The more you peel back the layers of yourself back for the other person, for you to then see that person be better than the person you could ever imagine for yourself, then you can really truly see the magic of life, in all its beauty.
When you are finally ready and your relationship has grown and you have come to trust your partner with the most intimate parts of you… then you can begin to really share all aspects of your life with one another, as ultimately, that is what comes of a partnership – you are a team – to weather all storms together, sometimes you will be the anchor riding the stern, when the other is not feeling as strong, and vice-versa. May you continue to grow both individually and together, as there is nothing more beautiful in life than to find a soul mate to ride through life together.
Words to my younger self
- Care less about how others see you and care more about how you see yourself.
- Work on yourself, who you are, who you want to be, before searching for another.
- The pain you feel in heartache, however long it feels like it may go on, will pass and honestly you will better for it. (I know, I know, everyone says it! But it is true!).
- You don’t need to be like others to be loved. The differences in each person is what make us all unique and beautiful in different ways. Your differences are in fact the very thing, that will make you just right for your soul mate.
- Trust your instincts.
- Work out what you require ‘mentally’ (only) from your lifelong partner and use this as guidelines to measure the people you let into your life.
- Be flexible with change and your guidelines.
- ‘Self love’ first, the ‘great love’ second.
- Be brave.
“In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave.
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free”– ‘Touched by an Angel’ by Maya Angelou