4.2
June 4, 2017

You’re Not Crying for your Ex—You’re Crying for Yourself.

A relationship is a funny thing.

Once we’ve found someone that is crazy enough to suit us, whose deep-seated emotional baggage seems to justify that of our own to the extent that we can tolerate each other, we then presume it is this person’s responsibility to assimilate the whole of our emotional body, our pain and inner turmoil, and make us feel whole.

If they fail to do this, then it ends in even further chaos and unhappiness.

Sounds nice, eh?

Moreover, after we break up, the other person is often deemed as incompetent, or even malicious, for not being able to wash away all of our pain in an euphoric rapture of love—for now, fulfilling us completely for the rest of our lives.

Let’s be honest, when we break up with someone, we are not crying for them, we are crying for ourselves. We are crying because they did not complete us, and the agony of incompleteness seems to be too much to bear.

You see, this is why romantic relationships are so powerful and earth-shattering. What they represent is the total unification of humanity—a complete coalescence of two seemingly divergent forces, and thereby the end of all separateness and loneliness. The conjoining of the masculine and the feminine symbolize oneness, wholeness, and fullness. With this comes a profound sense of catharsis because we are no longer confined to the sheer bleakness of being an isolated ego-entity detached from all that is other—the harmonization of human existence.

It makes sense that we’re crushed after the fact, because it was quite clearly a tough bargain to begin with. Perhaps if we approached a relationship as more of a communion, a kind of agreement that is constantly adjusted and modulated as we grow and change through the course of our lives, then we wouldn’t be so broken when it all comes crashing down.

Giving ourselves to another person is not about projecting all of our grief and craziness onto them; rather, it is about caring for them without needing a good reason to. Love is unconditional, meaning when we love someone, we do not expect something in return.

Love is beyond all expectation.

So, you see, we are not crying for her, we are crying because there is a gaping hole in our heart and we were under the false assumption that she was going to fill it. We thought that she was going to take in all of our chaos and wash it all away. We believed she was going to fulfill our most wondrous and glorious wishes, make our deepest dreams of self-completion and everlasting joy come true.

Of course, a certain amount of difficulty is expected in relationships, but not to this extent. I feel that this could be wholly avoided, that this anguish and heartache could be transcended, but first we have to look within ourselves and sort our stuff out.

How can we expect to have a healthy and balanced relationship if we are neither of those things ourselves? I mean, for God’s sake! Why didn’t we take that into account!?

So, let’s go inward and take a look at ourselves, honestly and objectively, and if we don’t like what we find, then let’s change it.

We must uncover this sense of completeness and harmony within ourselves before we can bring it about in our relationships. As is within, so goes without.

We have to sort ourselves out if we want to have successful relationships, and we do this by engaging in practices that allow us to bring our own junk to the surface, to forage through our own psychic garbage, and make some sense out of our own minds.

I do this by inquiring into the nature of my own thoughts and attempting to discern whether they contain any truth. Most of the time they don’t, obviously, because the mind is always buzzing about. Fostering this ability to look at our thoughts objectively is crucial in inducing a sense of balance inwardly. Many of our thoughts are simply negative patterns that are not grounded in anything real. If we can separate the real from the false within our own minds, then we are well on our way to mastering this life in all its facets.

So, in the words of Mr. Tupac Shakur, “But please don’t cry, dry your eyes, never let up. Forgive, but don’t forget, girl, keep your head up.”

Loss is a difficult thing, don’t get me wrong, but we make it substantially more difficult by seeking total solidarity and fulfillment in another person. We must start with ourselves, scouring through our own sh*t, and the rest will sort itself out.
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Author: Samuel Kronen
Image: Xusenru/Pixabay

Editor: Danielle Beutell

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