It’s hard to believe love will happen again in my life as I have just moved to the Chicago area, have no social life thanks to the pandemic and I’m not feeling the internal motivation to start dating. It feels socially improbably and emotionally insurmountable to be ready to date someone. I keep asking myself, do I even want to be with someone right now? The answer keeps coming back, “No.” Yet I find myself wondering if I’ll ever answer YES to the question.
I’ve had two loves in my life. Do I get a third chance at love? When I’m in my logical space, I know love can always happen again. When I’m not in that space, I think I blew it. Should I have settled and just changed what I thought love was? No, I know, no matter what headspace I’m in, I shouldn’t. The more I learn about people’s marriages, the more I find myself discourage at those that did settle. Is anyone happily married?
As the dust settled around me after breaking up, the topic of dating came up. Being single (and self-isolating) has forced me to dig in a lot into who I am. Who I want to be. What I want to do. Where I want to be. But the one thing I can’t think about? Who I want to be with.
There’s so many ways to expand your love that isn’t romantic. Turns out those are the avenues I have enjoyed exploring. The idea of a romantic love seems like a one-way dead-end situation. And yet, there’s a few pangs when on a Sunday night that make me wonder, will and how will I ever fall in love again? Do you get three chances? Even if the previous two loves weren’t the right ones for you?
Is There One Person?
When I was a teenager, my older sister Wendy asked me and my friends if we thought there was more than one person out there for you. The question has stayed with me. I think I was the person two people who dated me needed but yet they weren’t the one I need. So that does that mean I was am the right person for multiple people but there’s only one for me?
Insurmountable Moments
There’s so many incredible moments that have to happen for people to meet and fall in love. One misstep, one decision can change your entire world, good or bad. It feels absolutely insurmountable the amount of things that have to happen for me to find the person and fall in love with them. Insurmountable. First, I have to even be willing to meet someone. That’s the first issue. It’s not that I’m closed to it, but it feels so painful to even think about falling in love again. Sometimes I just stay home because it’s so scary to think that I might be in the wrong place when I’m supposed to meet the person who is for me. It feels better to be alone than think you’re possibly supposed to be elsewhere, ready for your life to change.
My friend Monique found her future husband on a flight. I’m thrilled she’s found him but I just keep thinking, what if ONE thing had gone wrong that day? Would they have found each other? What if I’m supposed to be doing something else?
Will It Be Too Late?
So what if we find each other, against all odds, but it’s too late. We were a year, a month a week too late. And we both know it. What happens then? I can’t tell you how familiar I am with the pain of two time not aligning for relationships. It feels like a bad rom-com where you finally are about to have your big chance and the other person gets out of a car with their family.
I just keep waiting for it to hit. For me to say yes, I’m ready for all of this to happen again. I thought it would start to happen now.
Perhaps it feels insurmountable that I’ll meet someone because this isn’t the season for that. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s it. I don’t think I’ll fall in love for a very long time. My “season” of this will probably be a few years, but I don’t know the future. I know this season is for me to explore who I am and grow in that. Still, in the back of my mind I wonder, am I supposed to be falling in love now? Better yet, am I supposed to be falling in love with my friends, Eleanor, my job or something I don’t even know?
I’m hoping the third time’s the charm. (If you’re the third person reading this, I guesssssss I know what we’re going to be talking about at dinner.) This time I know who I am, what I need and I’m not settling for anything less. And you know what, if it’s not the third time, I can still have a fourth time and be okay. I don’t know what my love story is going to look like and that’s scary and feels impossible.
I wish I had the story that I can wrap nicely with a bow and tell you what the lesson is. Instead I have a messy, unending story that all I can do is say where I’m at in the moment. Someday I wonder if I’ll look back at this point and smile, “If only she knew what was about to happen.”
Until that day, I’ll believe love can happen again, even when it feels impossible.
Karly
Opening your heart back up to love after (multiple) heartbreaks is one of the bravest things any of us can do. I think all your feelings/thoughts on the topic are totally normal, and while the future is uncertain (for multiple reasons right now) I’m glad that you’re choosing to keep a relatively positive outlook that love will find you again when the timing is right. Also p.s. – I’m very happily married, so whatever married friends make you believe that’s impossible have some work to do!
Karly
https://www.whatkarlysaid.com
Kell
One of the normal feelings of grief and loss and heartbreak is fear. After my partner died 8 years ago, I was scared out of my mind for the first couple years that a) I’d never find love again, or b) that I’d find love, only to have it taken from me again by a random roll of the universe’s dice. That overwhelming feeling of fear and not being ready to date again faded with time. It took a few years, but it did.
One analogy that my therapist has shared with me that I find helpful is that our brains and thought patterns are like a sandy landscape: the more you travel one thought path, the deeper into the sand it gets dug, and the more likely you are to travel that thought pattern again. So, trauma (and heartbreak is a form of trauma) can make traveling the fear and anxiety paths easy for your brain to fall into. But, with work, you can start carving a new path in sand, that you can make deeper over time, that’s not the anxiety and fear paths. When you’re tired and stressed, you’re more likely to fall back into the grooves of anxiety and fear, but also: the more time you spend out of them, the more you heal and you spend building optimism, the shallower the anxiety and fear paths will get, and the easier they will be to get out of.
I’ve been in a relationship for the last few years, that I hope is working its way towards marriage. I still have fear sometimes, and I’m still dealing with scars, and things aren’t perfect, but I am hopeful that in another couple years (hopefully if our country gets more hopeful again and less scary to live in), perhaps I will be one of those people starting a happy marriage.
There’s a few sayings that Dan Savage uses that I like about the nature of relationships:
– Every relationship will fail until one doesn’t.
– There’s no settling down without settling for.
– What are you willing to pay the price of admission for? Some things are worth it, and others aren’t, and you can leave a relationship at any time for any reason and it’s valid.
– Question: Are you ever sad about the person you chose for marriage? Answer (from the musical Oklahoma, I believe he references): You’re always sad, and always grateful. Both are true. (You will always have doubts, but also will be so glad you have this person making your life better on the whole.)
These remind me to just keep moving forward and listening to myself, and things will either work out or they won’t, in time.
It’s so dumb, but really, time (and continuing the work on yourself) are the things that seem to heal these types of feelings and thoughts.
This is a long rambling comment that I’m not sure makes that much sense. Anyway: I think you’re doing great, listening to yourself, and that these thoughts are normal. Keep it up. 🙂
Lydia
If there is one thing I love about you and what you share here, it’s that things don’t have to be tied up with a bow before they can be shared. Life is a process, and I would feel so much more discouraged if you had waited to write this until you were ready to date, ready to announce you’d found your third love. I’ve kept dating off the table for such a long time, because I know I need to fill my empty spaces on my own, and not look for someone else to do it. I’m not sure how long it will take to get there, but I want to believe I won’t have ‘missed my moment’ by the time I do.
Chic on the Cheap