8 Things That Happen When You Find Love Before You’ve Completely Healed From Heartbreak
In a perfect world, breakups are clean and linear, and the pain of what we lose doesn’t bleed into the love of what we find. Yet this is very rarely the case, though what’s even more rare is for people to really talk about what it’s like to find love when you’re still heartbroken – rather than what it’s like to never find love at all. Both are equally challenging. Here are a few reasons why.
1. You realize that love can help you heal, but you can’t expect it to do the work for you entirely.
It’s almost taboo to suggest that love can “save” you in any way or form (it can’t, independent of your own desire to fix yourself) but it can, however, help you heal – and it’s supposed to. Oftentimes, it’s actually a matter of letting go of why you’re not supposed to let love in again, before you sabotage the new relationship along with the old.
2. You project old problems onto your new relationship.
Think of it like emotional muscle memory: when you’re used to relating and interacting in a certain way within a certain kind of relationship, that doesn’t necessarily change just because the person on the receiving end of it has.
3. You begin to recognize why it’s so crucial to spend time apart between relationships.
The reason it’s such a hit to the ego to lose a relationship is because of how deeply we identify with them. You need that space to reconnect to yourself before you transfer all of your time and attention onto somebody else. It just reminds you who comes first.
4. You realize that if you waited until you felt “ready” to move on, you’d be waiting forever.
It’s not that you don’t want to be alone or that you absolutely need a relationship, only that after a certain point, you must “take the leap.” Nobody ever really feels like they’re ready to move on, as the saying goes: “90% ready, 10% terrified.”
5. You have to make a conscious effort not to let your new partner fill the gaps your old one left.
A lot of the time, we’re most heartbroken not over who we lose, but what we think we lose along with them. If we felt our ex validated our self-esteem, it’s the loss of self-esteem that we must mourn the most. Yet, unless you recognize the parts of your life you want someone else to “fill,” you’ll just keep transferring the responsibility for your happiness to everybody but yourself.
6. You realize that you do not have to stop your entire life to heal.
There’s a misperception that to heal from a relationship or breakup, you must hit the pause button on basically everything else. While this is sometimes true to a degree, it can be more unhealthy than not if taken too far. You can just as easily work to strike a balance of taking it slow and learning to incorporate time for yourself into your life even if you are starting to date again.
7. You recognize how incredibly fortunate you are.
You were prepared to be alone for, ehm, ever, but you’re so damn grateful things worked out the way they did.
8. You begin to subscribe ever so slightly more to the idea that “everything happens for a reason.”
It’s an annoying platitude mostly because nobody actually knows what that “reason” is, but in your case, it’s that you had someone so much better suited for you on the way… you just couldn’t see it at the time.