How Your Breakup Can Teach You The Best Lesson In Love

An ache. A sharp pain shoots up through the chest area, dangerously close to where the heart would be. Your throat and mouth dry up rapidly as breathing becomes faster and shallower. You try to gulp while droplets of cold sweat form on your forehead. No, This is not a description of the symptoms of an impending heart attack. This is how break ups feel when a relationship has been genuine.

When we feel a relationship spiraling downhill, we all dread those four words “We need to talk”.

You suddenly feel as if you are about to miss your flight. You try to stay positive about the whole thing while you are totally aware of the inevitable doom. Its just a matter of time. Deep within, you know something has died between you two. And then it happens.

The Aftermath

You try to get through it amicably but your heart wants to cry a thousand rivers. You want to cling to the corpse of your once beautiful relationship. The memories of all the beautiful moments together come rushing to you as you gaze upon the stony face of your lover. Perhaps looking for a shred, a hint of the love and tenderness it used to have.

An era comes to an end. You get shaken awake from a beautiful dream and you tell yourself to “move on”. You question the entire idea of romantic relationships and think to yourself “Is it worth all the heartache?”

It feels as if this is the price to pay for being happy in the past. Having hoped against hope that may be this one is meant to last. All those dreams you had preserved so carefully, of a possible future together get shattered in an instant.

Break-ups are seldom pretty. They bring an emotional hailstorm which is very hard to recover from. With each break up, it becomes more and more difficult to fall in love again. Our trust in love starts to dwindle and fade away. Bit by bit.

We promise ourselves “This is it. I am never falling in love again. I am done with relationships.” We curse love and put our guard up to protect ourselves from it in the future. We close ourselves down, torn and confused.

Slowly, bitterness creeps into our being. The first few days, we are heart broken and vulnerable. After that we start harboring bitterness and negativity towards love.

“It brings so much pain. I am better off without it”

Is Love To Be Blamed?

But what about the joy and happiness it brought? Was it all pain and no happiness? While cursing the pain and misery that we endured at the hands of love we forget to be grateful for the beauty and happiness it brought to us while it lasted.

The root of this pattern is our nature. As human beings, when we see a beautiful bird singing on a tree, we immediately wish to cage it. Make it ours, exclusively.

If we examine closely, we will find that it is not love itself that brings us so much pain and misery, it is our desperation to cling to the ‘object’ of love. Love in itself only brings beauty and happiness. We have to allow it to come and go. To move freely through our hearts.

Actually, we drive love out of a relationship by poisoning it with our clingyness and neediness. We lose love when we try to imprison it. The bird of love can only survive in the sky of freedom. It cannot survive in a cage.

Also, we try to confine love to a certain form. The romantic form. The nature of love is to change. To flow and evolve from one form to another. We need to accept love for what it is. And it is a wild animal. Free in spirit. Magnificent in its freedom. In our effort to capture and own it, we end up killing its essence. Its beauty is lost. The beauty of a wild animal is in the wild. When you take it out of the wild and put it in a cage, you only get the animal. Its essence is lost.

Love Dies In Bondage

This is one of the greatest paradoxes of the universe. When something is truly beautiful, the more you try to own it the more you will miss it. The more you try, the more you miss. Set it free and it is yours. All things truly beautiful have one thing in common. Freedom. That is the soul of beauty. And love is no exception to it.

Like all beautiful things, freedom is the soul of love. When we try to bind love through relationships, we try to limit it to a fixed form. We take away freedom from love. We take away the soul of love and we expect it to live. It slowly withers away and dies. We kill it and then we curse it when it dies. What an irony!

Each break up teaches us these values if we are aware enough. If we have the courage to look at things as they are we will see that with each break up we learn this immutable truth about love. With each failed relationship the truth that “Love perishes in bondage“ becomes clearer to us. Therefore, each break up is an opportunity to get to know ourselves and the nature of love more clearly.

The Takeaway

Break-ups aren’t a tragedy. Yes, they are painful no doubt. And it is Okay to express the pain. It is Okay to cry.

A break up just goes to show that we are yet to learn, yet to understand the nature of love. It is not about having, owning or controlling. Love is about setting the other completely free and empowered so that they can shine in all their beauty. If you or the other person feels bound or choked in a relationship, know that it is a need-based one. It is bound to fall apart sooner or later.

Letting go of the needy and clingy nature will open the doors for love to come in. Build a house for love in your heart but remember to build it without any latches or locks on the doors. Allow love to come and go freely through it.

“Only when you set love totally free, it becomes your slave”