We’ve all been there. It’s horrible. The sadness, the shock, the overthinking. The big ball of pain in your chest, and the constant desire to throw up.
Torn in the limbo of forgiving the unforgivable, or moving forward with a totally different future. Suddenly our best friend isn’t there to call.
Our bed is cold and empty and sleep is scattered and hard to find. And tears. Lots of tears.
This isn’t going to be the usual look to the future, know it will pass kinda story.
Instead it’s going to be about the Grand Gesture. One of my favourite love stories, and it’s still going.
Many years ago, a person screwed up. Big time. In doing so, he hurt the person who loved him. Beyond belief.
There was betrayal, and lots of it.
But in so many cases, when this stuff happens, we justify it.
This guy didn’t. He owned it. In a massively impressive way.
He wrote letters to every member of the woman’s family, apologizing for the pain he had caused, even family members he hadn’t met.
He told them he knew he screwed up. He told them he knew how much pain he had created.
He told them he loved her. And he told them what he was planning to do about it.
And he signed himself up for therapy. And he went. Consistently. And he told her what he was doing.
And he asked her to go with him after a while. At first she refused. She was hurt. Really really hurt.
Trust was destroyed. But she did still love him, so eventually she went. And she spent a lot of time expressing her rage and pain in those sessions. A lot.
But he stuck it out. For a long time. Years in fact. Because his love for her was bigger than his ego.
And eventually, they worked it out. It wasn’t easy. Trust is so very hard to rebuild. But they got there.
And I won’t say they haven’t had their moments since. They have.
The thing is, his motivation might have been to get her back. But he also knew he had a problem.
And that if he didn’t address it, he was going to carry it forward with him for the rest of his life.
So while you’re laying there in your ball of pain, you might want to think about this story.
Do I love this person enough for a grand gesture. Is there something more I could do. Did I screw up, and do I need to make amends, do I need professional help to sort my shit out?
You see, I believe that anything can be overcome.
For all the break up stories, there are the people out there who pulled themselves apart so they could put themselves back together as relationship material.
Relationships will force us to face our shit. Whether we choose to walk away or look it in the eye and decide it won’t have power over us is a personal choice.
We all have scars, and baggage, and issues. But when we face them head on, with the intention of becoming a better person, life gets better.
It’s hard and scary.
But it’s a whole lot better than repeating the same mistakes over and over all the while blaming, and probably hurting, every one else.
