WAnd everyone knows how to play things. After the break up.
It’s been immortalized a thousand times or more in film and TV, these clichés repeat ad nauseam until they become embedded in our collective psyche. We have to drink a lot, eat ridiculously large buckets of ice cream and sit in our pants with the curtains closed. We have to shower, cry and cry and scream obscenities to Eric Carman’s “All by Myself.” romcoms. But, above all, we must label our flawless ex-parouses as “bitches/bastards/losers” and forensically examine each and every one of their failings – a predator that cleans up the corpse in this latest post-mortem. is doing failed relationship. In short, we’re going to hate their guts.
Here’s the deal: In a world of black and white heart breakCommitting the heinous crime of hurting someone automatically turns the other party into an irredeemably bad person. Because, as it turns out, hating someone is a lot less painful than the alternative.
It requires real will power. This well-thumbed playbook is wrench free; The real power of forever keeping an ex off the scrapheap of romantic deadbeats. It’s easier to mold someone into a caricature of all their bad qualities than to recognize the ugly truth: that we loved them. That maybe we still love them and always will, just a little. that they are flawed but not monsters; Amid the gloom of the end of things, there are Such bright, technicolor happy memories. That they are too bright to take outside and see in the dark.
It is not easy to hold all these truths under stress. But I believe it’s really the key to moving forward.
That is why instead of finding weak comparisons between me exes‘ attitude and a Middle Eastern dictator, I decided to start doing as much of the opposite as possible: write them love letters. Well, not always letters, per se – emails, Facebook messages or WhatsApp are all perfectly acceptable digital alternatives. Regardless of the medium, the emotion remains the same: trying to express the person and our relationship to me in all their broken, kaleidoscopic glory.
I will admit that “letters” are not written in the first wave of grief, when emotions are still too tender to be examined, let alone distilled into words. But give it a few months – when the scar tissue heals, that initially, intense pain subsides into something dull and more manageable – and I sit, meditate, and my tired, I take out the beating heart.
Seeing as how it’s so close to Christmas, please take a moment to twiddle me with sincerity: however things shake out in the end, we’ve almost always gotten something from the people we gave our best. Have chosen to hand over the soft and precious parts. Maybe we’ve finally learned to ask for what we need. Maybe we finally see that the parts of ourselves that we consider undesirable can be accepted by others. Maybe we finally let ourselves be vulnerable, even if only for the briefest of moments. Whatever is, always is. something.
Honoring someone and the threads of life you’ve woven together amid the anger — and, as it may feel at first, actually thank you To them for this shared experience – one of the purest forms of closure I have ever experienced. There is a release in acknowledging how important a person was to you, a freedom in putting honesty ahead of pride, a joy in choosing to focus on past joys rather than past pain.
It’s rare that relationships don’t work out because we did. Actually Our hearts have been tricked into giving a walking manifestation of pure evil (or even just a common or a hole in the garden). Most people don’t actively try to hurt each other, and more often than not, breakups happen for reasons so complex and nuanced that it’s almost impossible to tell where things started to unravel. . And despite the victim/villain narrative often peddled by Hollywood, the reality is much murkier than that.
There is a release in admitting how important a person was to you, a freedom in putting honesty ahead of pride
People, for the most part, are doing their best to be happy, and making all kinds of mistakes in the never-ending journey to reach this elusive promised land. Accepting this fact and refusing to openly defame an ex does not make you weak. It may be the thing that gives you the strength to keep going.
There are a few caveats, of course. When one’s actions have been clearly harmful – if they are. abused you or sequentially cheated Or turned out to be a compulsive liar, complete with a A double life And second family – it goes without saying that you can leave “thank you”. It’s also worth checking your own motives to make sure there’s nothing hidden underneath: the idea of sending a letter is to mark the end of a chapter, not a burnt-out romance. picking at old wounds in the vague hopes of reviving It should be a full stop, not an ellipsis.
But if you can get down from your heart to a place of forgiveness, be able to appreciate what you had with another human being, wish them well and, importantly, Meaning This, it could be the best Christmas gift you can give yourself.
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