Take A Look At Your Last Love Before You Try Your Next
True love is when two people's broken hearts, with all the jagged pieces and sharp edges, happen to fit together.
Learning to love again is a process. Learning to forgive yourself takes time. That’s why sometimes that next love doesn’t always feel like you’re falling, like all the others did. Sometimes it feels like a calculated decision. And that’s okay.
When you read those fairytale stories as a kid or listen to your parents talk about their lifelong marriages, it’s like two people just fall into each other’s lap and they live happily ever after. But that’s not reality. That’s not how real love happens. I mean, sometimes it does but it doesn’t have to be like that.
True love is when two people’s broken hearts, with all the jagged pieces and sharp edges, happen to fit together.
Heartbreak is a part of the long journey, but it makes us into the people who are ready to eventually love one another down the road. If we act like our hearts have never broken, like we are indestructible concrete walls, we are lying to not only ourselves and the person we will eventually give our fragmented heart to.
If we are honest about what went wrong in our past relationships, if we open up to new lovers about what didn’t work, we may just find someone who can be everything we never got from all the others.
And this is a slow, sometimes painful process that we so often want to skip over. We act like it’s such a taboo conversation. We act like if we talk about our exes then it means we’re not over them. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you can honestly and impartially analyze what went wrong, then we can prepare ourselves for the next love. The love that could be the last love.
So don’t be afraid to think about the good and the bad. Don’t shy away from thinking about the parts of your past relationship that made you feel small. Because now you will know exactly what you will need from your next love to grow. You will know the kind of person you are and the kind of person you need to seek out.
That’s why true love shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. It shouldn’t feel like you stuck your hand in a hat and luckily picked out the best name. It should feel like a decision you make every day. It should feel like you are constantly assessing your decision. Because you know who you are and you know what you want. 
