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I Forgot That Breakups Hurt
At some point, I had decided that my heart was tough and scabby; I was wrong.
After a divorce, some truly epic dating disasters and other attempted relationships that had gone sour, I thought that I’d become resistant to heartbreak. It turns out that I was just used to ending the relationship in my head before it ended in real life. When I looked back, every relationship ended with me as the instigator, and a couple had dragged on long past their expiry date. It wasn’t that I was happy about the endings; it was more that I had made my peace with the inevitable long before it came to be. Rather than taking the pain as a single shot, I spread it out in small sips over an extended period.
Time and an awful lot of therapy have taught me that it’s ok to walk away from something that is damaging you. A lover, a friend or even a parent that is causing you more harm than good is not something that you need to keep around in your life. When a breakup feels like more like regaining yourself than losing that person, you know that you’ve made the right decision. My former husband is a wonderful man, but not the right partner for me. My mother is not a particularly kind person or a good mother. While losing them makes me sad, I don’t regret ending those relationships.
This time was different. In a comedy of errors that would have amused Shakespeare, we…
