I read a thought provoking update the other day on Facebook. I don't remember the exact words but what the person was basically saying was that we need to give each relationship a clean slate and not let past experiences ruin it with the person that you meet in the present or future.
After my last relationship ended I had it in my head that my next partner should be someone who was divorced. I reasoned that someone who was from a marriage that didn't work out would better understand what it took to make a relationship/marriage work because the assumption is, we learn from those experiences and can do better when the opportunity presents itself again.
This was until I read an article that said a large number of people who get divorced once are likely to do it again, not because the second or third time is unbearable but because the new partner is constantly being judged against the behaviour of the previous partner. Which means a person is likely to leave not because things are irreconcilable but because in the minds of their partner, what they are doing resembles what the other party did and this becomes the cue that says one must leave.
So the update I read had so much truth to it. That sometimes it's not the relationship dying a natural death but dying because it is suffocated by everything in our past that we don't let go off. We continue to feed our fears and hurts to the point that that becomes the only thing that survives. When it happens we don't realise how wrong we are instead the death of another relationship reinforces our belief that no one can measure up to the kind of love we want.
We are asking for something that we are not prepared to receive and then turn around and say it doesn't exist. Most of us having been broken before learn to shield ourselves in an effort to protect our hearts but often don't realise that the higher we build our walls, the harder it becomes for love to penetrate those walls.
Making any relation work requires that we be prepared to be vulnerable and this is where most of us go wrong because we walk in with baggage rather than lessons. We don't want to let our guard down and this blinds us to what is and could be. We learn to play our cards close to our chests, we play mind games and let pride and ego dictate how much of ourselves we give away with each encounter.
Given that we need to guard our hearts but until we learn to be vulnerable, we are just wasting each other's time because it means we are holding back. It's our vulnerability that will allow us to give another a clean slate and allow us to let another in and trust them not to hurt us with what we give to them. It is the realisation that we need to be prepared to give what we hope to receive. Our experience of the past should not take away our willingness to try again.
#RLG
