Whether you’ve loved once or countless times, losing love is not easy, anyway you look at it. Whatever the reason for having lost it, the loss is still a loss, and it hurts so much that you think you’re never getting up off your bathroom floor and be a whole person again. But there is a silver lining to every dark cloud, and there is light at the end of the seemingly endless tunnel you’re walking in.
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However, this light at the proverbial tunnel brings clarity along with hope. And this clarity and its accompanying realizations you have, are what we’re going to talk about here.
1. That your next one would be the last
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Without any conscious thought, you’ve assumed that this next love would be your last love. Because let’s face it, nobody gets into a relationship thinking it will break down in the future. It’s almost always thought of for life. And you thought that there was no way you could survive another breakup or another person who just wasn’t right for you. However, life has a way of testing your strength when you least expect it.
2. That you could somehow make them love you
Hope makes the world go round, no question about it. But carrying the hope that you can mend your broken relationships even though you know that there’s no putting back what’s shattered into a million little pieces. You can’t make someone love you, and you can’t force someone to accept your love. It has to happen naturally. But hoping otherwise is why so many people end up staying in abusive, dysfunctional, unhealthy, unstable, and mediocre relationships to begin with.
3. That you don’t want to settle for less
When you’re in love, it’s hard to see your relationship objectively because you’re too enmeshed and entangled in it. But when you take a step back and see it from an outsider’s perspective, you realize that you don’t want to settle for an uncertain love, or with someone who doesn’t love you respect you as much as you should be, no matter however much you wish to be back in their arms just because it’s comfortable.
4. That your understanding of love will evolve
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It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in love once or a million times, your definition and understanding of love, and the way you experience it – all of it changes as you evolve and change yourself.
5. That you love someone more after you lose them
That saying that goes something like, you won’t know the value of what you have till you’ve lost it, holds true, and life affirms the same time and again. And this is never truer than when you lose love.
6. That the ‘love yourself’ spiel everyone spouts is really important
Everyone needs love, but before you seek it elsewhere, you need to love yourself – warts and all. Because if you seek it outside of yourself to make you feel validated, then that’s just sad. It’s hardly dignified if you’re desperate for another person to make you feel worthy and valid.
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7. That you need to take care of yourself regardless of your relationship status
You should be your main concern, nobody else. You need to take care of you. Granted that losing love isn’t a walk in the park, but if it requires to put in effort to just get through the most mundane and prosaic things, then you need to wake up. That’s when you realize the importance of taking care of yourself in the most basic of senses.
8. That your friends and family won’t let you go down the rabbit hole
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Genuine friends and family is what will carry you out of the murky depths of despair and hurt you find yourself in after losing love. They listen to you when you whine about your lost love, they listen to you when you analyze what went wrong for the thousand and sixteenth time, and they give you the much-needed kick to the rear to get you out of your funk. Thank God for good friends!
9. That people change
Of course, they do. After all, change is the only constant. If you don’t change, then you just stagnate. People, in general, change, but when this change is too marked or too out of character for them, is when you’re hurt. Maybe because they were always that way and showed their true colors now, or because they really have changed the way they feel about you. Either way, you knew this was coming, nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt any less.
10. That you deserve more
You may have been in a relationship that was not bringing out the best in you, that wasn’t making you happy at all, that was lacking respect. But when you pick up and leave after realizing that you deserve more, is when you feel empowered. It hurts, obviously, but to actually acknowledge to yourself that you deserve more, is more important.
11. That your wants and needs when it comes to your partner are different
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You may know what you want in your partner, but do you know what you need from them? Once you’ve been around the block a few times, you may note that what you want might be pretty shallow. But then you realize that those shallow things don’t do a thing to sustain a healthy, stable relationship. That is when your priorities and your mental checklist change – for the better, and that’s when you realize that what you wanted wasn’t exactly what you needed.
12. That insecure people are the worst to break it off with
The insecure person could be you or the other person, but if it’s you, then it’s extra hard. Because those insecurities make you hold on to the relationship with extra talons, because you feel that you need someone else to sustain you. As mentioned above, you need to be okay to be with yourself and cherish the relationship you have with yourself.
13. That it isn’t pathetic or sad to want to be loved
Everyone deserves to be loved, and it is one of the most basic human wants. However, to get to a place where you don’t feel pathetic because you want and therefore seek love, sadly seems pathetic. You just have to get from there to here.
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14. That romantic love isn’t all there is to life
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Granted that romantic love is important because you spend more than half your life with a person who isn’t related to you by blood or is a friend. So it is important, but your happiness shouldn’t and mustn’t be tied to another person, because you should be making that choice to be happy.
These realizations that you have after losing love aren’t all that badass, because you’ve known them all along, maybe never acknowledged them to yourself or voiced them out loud. Now that you have read this list, be happy that you’re in a place where you’re a little wiser and a lot more mature. Happy loving.
Featured image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
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