When my first boyfriend broke up with me at 21, I panicked.
Like a parent rips the hot warm sheets off their sleeping kid in the middle of winter, after their kid ignored their ‘it’s time to get ready for school’ warnings five times over. I was left cold, dazed and blinking into the cold bright world outside. I just wanted to pull the blanket right back over my head and drift back into sleep.
So I tried everything to do just that. I tried getting his mother to convince him he’d made a mistake. She was forever her sweet and lovely self, but the answer was a definitive: no. I tried the old ‘let’s have casual sex and then you’ll remember how deeply in love with me you are.’ Cause, you know, that always works, doesn’t it? I tried showing him what he was missing. Which looked like me telling him, after half a bottle of vodka, that he’d simply never meet someone as good as me again ever as long as he lived. Like, ever. For real. All while I was smelling like a nightclub toilet and slurring my words and literally any other human on the planet would have been a more enticing option than me at that moment.
I tried the driving by his house with my best friend five times and crying at the end of the street. Cause there’s nothing sexier than that
Surprisingly, none of it worked.
And if I was truly, really honest with myself, I would have admitted the relationship wasn’t right, and we weren’t a great match.
I tend to suck at endings. Especially when it involves letting someone I once loved, go. I hang on, very very tight. And even once it has become blatantly clear the love isn’t there, I hang onto the last, stinky cigarette-butt of that fantasy, of that memory, long after I should have let it go.
This isn’t just in my romantic relationships. In the past, I’ve hung onto friendships with people even after they’ve blatantly shown me they do not have my back when it counts. I’ve said ‘I love you, too!’ To people who have turned their back on me when I needed them most. I’ve said ‘no worries, sister!’ to people who have come at me with an ulterior motive, even if I can see it clear as day as they approach. I’ve taken people who have fundamentally not had my best interests at heart back into my life with a smile.
That has changed for me in the past year or so.
I don’t know exactly when people leaving my life stopped feeling like a disaster and started feeling like an invitation. Not always, of course, and not perfectly, because I’m human, but there’s been a fundamental shift and I feel it.
And I don’t know when I started repeating these words to myself but I want to tell them to you now: there is always more love on the way. Always. More love is on the way to you now, right now. I know that might seem impossible to comprehend, especially if you’re in a season of great loss, but believe me. It’s on its way, in so many different shapes and forms. It might be taking the express post or snail mail. But it’s on its way, from all different corners of the planet. There are so many people out there who want to love you in a million different ways.
I want you to think of a time you lost someone, and really thought it was the end of the world.
Maybe it was a first boyfriend, or a friendship, or a connection that meant a lot to you. How do you feel about it now? Did more love come, in time?
I have friends in the past who have caught their partner cheating on them, or lying to them, or have got into some ideological discussion where they realized their values are fundamentally different. I have had friends who have ended friendships regretfully after someone has done or said something that just completely goes against their fundamental values. Sometimes they say “I wish I had never gone through his phone and seen those messages,” or, “I just wish I had never started that discussion.” They wanted to pull the blankets back over their head. Into the warm, soft security. Into sleep. But as my friend Sophia always says; ‘wouldn’t you rather know the truth now? Rather than in five years or ten years where you’ve invested more of your time, your heart, your energy?’ Life is so short. You deserve to spend each day surrounded by good, decent, high quality people. People who truly give a damn about your heart.
If someone has decided to take the first flight out of your life, let them.
Let the bright world outside, in. Maybe you’re holding onto a partner, a friendship, a business connection, any connection, simply because you’re scared there’s nothing better. Maybe because you don’t think you deserve any better. But think of how the time, the space, the energy on them could otherwise be spent. I don’t mean ‘looking for someone better’ in a superficial way. I mean you could be finding and connecting with people who really get you, who are genuinely good for your soul, who truly have a vested interest in your heart and what it needs.
