When It’s Over
Are you ready? I’m going to share with you one of the greatest myths of our times: We are meant to fall in love once, and stay together with that person for the rest of our lives. Haven’t we all been told that? Haven’t we all been told that true love is forever? Well, it is, and it isn’t.
First of all, yes, there are those whose High Self, the God(dess) part of them plans at the outset to find their partner, (usually a soulmate, someone who they have known and loved in past lives) and stay together literally ‘til death do they part. But that is relatively rare. Most of the time, our High Selves agree that we will meet in this lifetime and stay together for a pre-determined amount of time. We will learn what we can learn from each other, and then it will be complete and we will move on to continue our learning with different partners. This may turn out to be a total of two partners or twenty. None of it is wrong.
The problem is, our personalities usually don’t know that, and our society tells us differently. So, and here’s the really crucial part: we are set up to think that we have failed if our relationship or our marriage, Goddess forbid, doesn’t last forever. In fact, when I was married and going to counseling, our therapist literally told us that we had failed at marriage. Wow. For years afterward, I was afraid to really commit to anyone else because I believed what he said, and didn’t want to fail again. And the truth is, if our relationships end it doesn’t mean we have failed at all. It simply means we have chosen differently.
And here’s the part where true love really IS forever. For example, my last partner and I loved each other deeply, even though we eventually chose to separate in this lifetime. We loved each other before we met in this lifetime, we loved each other for the five years that we were in relationship, and we will love each other for the rest of our current lifetimes and into eternity. I know that may sound incredibly sappy and over dramatized, but it is actually true. I can’t explain how I know that exactly. I just feel it in my bones.
So, what? What is the implication about all of this? Here’s the big payoff. If we accept the new paradigm, we don’t have to go with the old way of breaking up. The old way is, since we are all meant to stay together forever, and since we’re not doing that, this must mean not only that we have failed but that there is something wrong with one or both of us. We messed up. We are defective. You are defective. I am defective. We feel pressure to come up with a laundry list of reasons we are going to give when someone asks us “why?”. I didn’t handle it right. (S)he has all these bad qualities that I can’t put up with any longer. And it goes on and on.
I did that when I divorced my husband. I came up with a long list of all the things he did wrong and all the ways I didn’t voice my displeasure strongly enough or soon enough, and thus the marriage had failed. The real truth was, I didn’t even know why I was divorcing him, I only knew I needed to do it. It was over.
In the new paradigm, you get to say: “It’s been a great ride together, and it’s over now. Thank you for allowing me to grow and learn together with you. Thank you for all the good times, and all the bad times. I learned from all of them. I honor who you are, and I love you. There is nothing wrong with either you or me. It is sad to part ways, but it is part of the plan we made together with God. I trust that our High Selves made this plan in perfect knowing of what was for our highest good.” Isn’t that much better than: “I’m leaving you because you’re a @#$ ”?