What Happens When You Find Love Again.
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There are plenty of articles regarding how to recognize a toxic relationship, and how to release yourself from the responsibility of saving it when you are sacrificing yourself for something that is only draining you.
There are also plenty of articles that consider the healing process afterwards: reminding you tenderly how to be alone again, how to finally hold your heart the way that you’ve always held others, how to regard your grief and your solitude as the means to manifesting a deeper, more gentle, and actualized connection to your self, how to accept your pain, how to release it, how to own up to your role in a codependent relationship that has wrung you out.
There is a lot of wisdom out there on how to emerge from a broken relationship, first crawling, then surrendering to the grief and loss, then finally growing into a more wholehearted and more joyful person. Yet what is lacking is wisdom on how to love again.
What they don’t tell you is that no matter how much healing you have found, when you find love again with someone you know that you can trust, with someone you know could be the one to treat you as you deserve, the one that you will love wholeheartedly, and they’ll love you wholeheartedly back, you will still doubt it.
They don’t tell you how the red flags don’t disappear. The same signals that went off in the last relationship, the one that drained and damaged you, will go off in this new love too. You’ll have learned not to ignore them like you did the first time, because that’s what our primal instincts tell us to do.
Our instincts are to freeze, to run, or to fight, and the only way to handle it is to face it. At the same time the fear creeps up that this new person is here to hurt you and drain you and distrust you like the other, you will know otherwise. Yet you will also doubt yourself.
You trusted the last one when the red flags went off, so what makes this one different? What makes this love trustworthy and worth it? Between the fear and the doubt of your own understanding of the fear that is still in your mind, you have to trust your heart and your intuition.
They don’t tell you how hard some days will be, and how difficult it will be to determine what fear is trying to convince you as truth, and what the truth is. What they don’t tell you is that the single-handed reason that you’ll know that this new relationship is unlike the other one is when their patient love for you wins.
They don’t talk about how you will know that their love is true and kind and worthy of fighting. When you have accepted fear and share what it feels like to them, and their hand rests on your leg and their eyes peer into yours, and they don’t get up and leave or stop listening or get defensive, but they stay and they see you and they choose you.
You’ll know when they accept you.
What they don’t tell you is that the healing keeps happening for weeks and months and years, and continues even when you’ve found new love. They don’t tell you that sometimes you’ll still be afraid that this new love will act like the last. They don’t tell you that when it’s true love, they’ll silence the fear with their acceptance.
Their hugs will be the safe place you’ve waited to call home. Their ongoing presence to you and all of your complexities, all of your strengths, graces, and offerings, will be the very salve to the wounds of your past.
What they haven’t told you, what I’m telling you, is that you will find new love, and when you do, it will be difficult. It will be confusing. It will be convoluted at times with the voices in your head inherited from the past loves that hurt you.
But it will be worth it, because your new love’s voice will sound, loud, clear, and real, reminding you that what you wanted and believed in all along is what you deserve. I’m telling you that you’ll find love again, and it will be all that you wanted, so be gentle with fear, take your time, remember that you’re still healing, and trust this new love.
I’m telling you this, because it’s happened to me.
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Rebekah Kolbe, aka The Moonchilde to her equally eccentric friends, is a writer and newb Yoga teacher in the Michiana area in passionate cultivation of a consciously loving and creative lifestyle. When she isn’t writing sassy and sappy personal essays or exploring esoteric psychology, adoring her loved ones, practicing Yoga, cooking, making music, or walking in the woods, she is working for the creatively philanthropic company called MudLOVE. To get connected to more of her musings, go here.
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