Hello everyone!
Have you ever met a person who you thought would be the love of your life? I have! I thought my late husband, Jeff, and I would be together forever. You could not have told me otherwise. I was wrong. He was not the love of my life, it just seemed that way for awhile. It's hard to know how he felt, as his real thoughts and feelings were rarely shared with me. I had been fooled, in turn fooled myself and he kept making really bad decisions - a recipe for a relationship disaster among other things.
Does that sound familiar? Perhaps you are wondering the same thing about someone else. You feel betrayed and deceived, perhaps both? "Did I miss it?", you ask yourself. The truth of the matter is sometimes we miss it, sometimes we pick the wrong person and sometimes we are deceived by the other person. I know it's not a simple answer. For me, I was both deceived by Jeff and yet I also picked the wrong person. I say that because I had warning signs my relationship would derail and I ignored them. I also ignored some gut instincts (never do this!). I am here to tell you if it walks life a duck, quacks like a duck and/or even remotely smells like a duck - it's a duck!
So what do we do when the love of our life turns out not to be the love of our life? What do we do with our broken heart? We acknowledge we are heartbroken. We grieve our loss. We cry, we get angry. We forgive ourselves if we have been deceived, missed it or picked the wrong person. A bitter, resentful heart never heals. We look at ourselves to see if there is anything in us that draws us to certain people - trust me, this is one of the best things I have ever done for myself. We take time to be alone and to be comfortable in our own skin - to like ourselves - too many people miss this and repeat the same pattern. If you can't be content in your aloneness, you won't be content later on with someone else because you don't like yourself and you haven't learned to be happy nor accept who you are.
Two of the most important things we can do is 1) Let God our heal our heart 2) Never stop loving. We need to surround ourselves with friends and family who love us. We need to seek out ways to love our neighbors, our community and our world. Through love comes healing. Now you are probably saying "wait a minute, didn't hurt come through loving in the first place?" Yes, there will always be some kind of hurt where love is concerned but it's what we do with the hurt that matters. We can let hurt shrivel us up and we can die inside or we can learn from our heart and bloom again - it is up to us. Our broken heart an be healed, we just have to take the first step.
Yes there is life after love that is lost. After all, you are not responsible for another person or their actions. There is not only life, there is happiness and joy. I am in the best place of my life right now but I had to do some healing and ask some tough questions to get there. Trust me, all the tough questions and the time I put into my healing was and is worth it! I have trusted God more in the last three years than I have my entire life! As a result, I believe I will go more places than I have ever been in my entire life.
For those of you that feel way right now, who are heartbroken, there is new life coming! Lean into the One Who knows everything about you! Don't let one person keep you from loving! Take the time you need to heal and learn from your alone time. I believe I will meet another man to love. I don't know who he is or when he's coming my way but I believe I will have that opportunity because I am choosing love. Choose love! Above all else choose love!
Living and loving,
Elizabeth
**If you want to know more about my story, please see my book The Road Less Traveled: A Story of Love, Pain, Hope and Everything In Between. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iTunes, Audible.com, Kobo.com and the Kobo app, Goodreads.com, BookHub, and Books a Million (BAM). In Canada, you can find it on !ndigo.com, McNally Robinson Books, and Russell Books.