Last week I touched on grieving the loss of a loved one, but there is also another kind of grieving and that is the end of a relationship, especially a long term one where it appears that the other person ends it for no reason at all.

When my first marriage ended, and I want to state that I was the one that ended it, and I was at the Family Court in Parramatta and the Judge decreed that the marriage would be dissolved in one month and one day, I walked out of that court room, sat in my car and cried and cried, because that wasn’t how I thought my marriage would end.  Did I want to go back?  No, not at all, but I was sad that it had come to that end, I didn’t get married thinking I’d be divorced and a single mother at 27.

When a relationship ends, there is always hurt, sometimes anger and a lot of resentment.  But how it affects you personally is always different to how it affects someone else, but there will be a huge blow to your self-esteem and lots of questions of why?  And the grieving of something that you thought would be for life, that now isn’t.  It’s not easy to pick up the pieces and get on with your life, but it’s something that we have to.

Do take a moment to look back on that relationship that has ended and be honest with your own faults in the relationship and learn from that.  No-one is perfect, however, I’m not saying that the person left behind is to blame, not at all, what I’m saying is we can all take time to learn things about ourselves, how we handle things, how we react, what our priorities are, we can take those things away and make sure that we don’t fall into the same habits again.

It takes two people to make a relationship work, and it’s bloody hard sometimes!  It is a constant learning curve because we are each individually changing all the time and that’s what we need to remember.

Just because your relationship has ended doesn’t mean you’re unlovable, it means you grew apart and not together.  Learn from it and take that with you to the next relationship, the learning that is, not the hurt.

Cry for what will not be, that’s OK.  Learn from it.  Grow from it.  Know that when you get into a new relationship that you’ll be wiser for it.  Love with all your heart, otherwise it’s not worth it.