You crashed into them fully, uncontrollably, without looking back. Without knowing how, or when, or from where. Maybe you dated briefly, maybe you had a full-fledged relationship or maybe, you were never officially together.

When a big love ends in shambles, we don’t deal well with the emptiness. A single moment with that empty spot causes excruciating pain. It breaks your heart, mind, body, and soul. The person who once made your cells dance now makes blinking and breathing and speaking feel like so much effort.

When we think of love, we think of the happy kind of love, the kind that results in growing old with someone - the kind that results in a happily ever after. There is, however, another kind of love, the love that doesn’t result in the joining of two people, the fusing of two lives into one. You might think it’s a darker and sadder kind of love, the kind of love that doesn’t signal the beginning of something beautiful.

But I believe this to be untrue.

When you’re in a dark hole of sadness and anger and confusion you don’t, and can’t see that it’s not that this person wasn’t your soulmate, but sometimes the purpose of a soulmate is to change your life, teach you so much more than a happily ever after ever could. “But why does my heart still break every time I think about them?” you often think. Because you know by now that time does not heal all wounds. In the words of Dr. Phil, “Time doesn’t change us. It’s what we do with that time that changes us.”

Entertain your pain, and you’re giving it the power it needs to gnaw away at you, eating you alive. Accept that sometimes life gives you people so they can challenge, stir different parts of you in order for you to wake up, and you can take that pain and use it as fuel, ammunition to light your own fire, change your own life.

Use all that anger, frustration, agony. The best way to heal from the toxicity of past relationships is to start over. Walk away from that shitty job, or commitment that is making you miserable. Go after something you've always wanted. When you’re heartbroken and your life is lying in shambles, you’re ironically given the ideal opportunity to begin again. It hurts. But it will lift you higher. There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there, that you still haven't experienced, who you still haven't met. But It’s up to you to be open when you find them.

There’s a saying that you never meet the right people at the wrong time because the right people are timeless. But I disagree. You can meet someone at a moment in their life where they’re not ready. Their past, demons, can make a person emotionally incapable of reaching their highest potential - and consequently incapable of being ready for love, no matter how much they might feel it.

Your heart has an immeasurable amount of love in it, of greatness, of magic. It's there. It’s a gift. You see, you fell in love with the greatest potential of your ex, rather than with who they are right now. But the truth is, you can never ever hang on to relationship waiting for someone to grow into their own greatness. You can never hold on to someone who sabotages their own happiness out of a resistant to trust it.

When you accept this and forgive them, your demons have no power. The anger, memories, regrets and dark thoughts that burden your heart, they’ll have no control. The shadowy corners of your mind—they can’t survive when there’s nothing there to fuel the darkness. And so is the beautiful side of a darker love.

Also check out: When Your Heart Is Broken, That's When New Light Gets In

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