LIFE LESSONS
Divorce May Be the Only Way for You to Find True Love
A lot of people believe that not getting love right the first time around means that they’ve failed. Or something’s wrong with them. That maybe they’re not meant for love at all.
This is why many tend to romanticize first loves, or take breakups hard. It’s one of the reasons why some people think that getting a divorce is the same as giving up on any hope of a happy ending.
But that’s not how love works.
Sometimes, it can take a lifetime to find a person who will make you feel the way storybooks have always described love to feel like.
And sometimes, you will get it wrong first before you can figure out how to get it right.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
Relationship consultants like myself meet people with differing opinions on divorce almost every day. Even those who went through the process themselves still can’t help but feel like it’s a way of admitting defeat.
Klara, 37 and a divorcee herself, told me that signing the papers that declared her single again felt like all the sacrifices she made to fix her marriage had all been in vain.
As a mother of three, she’d thought she had to do everything in her power to hold her family together, and getting a divorce would only tear it all apart.
But Adam, a former colleague of mine, had another way of looking at it.
Adam had been in his mid-fifties when we first met and he’d already had two ex-wives. He said divorce is a way of minimizing your losses, of making sure you stop pursuing something that’s no longer working as early as you can to give yourself the best chances of finding something else that will.
“We gave it a go,” I remember Adam telling me with a rueful shrug. “It didn’t work, so we had to move on.”
Giving Up vs. Letting Go
Divorce is often controversial because it’s seen as some kind of surrender. As two people giving up on love.
But holding on tightly to something can also mean you run the risk of being unable to catch everything else that life wants you to have. It can keep you from growing, or even get you stuck.
A lot of people are like my friend Klara, who first saw divorce as her failure as a wife and as a mother. But if she’d stayed in her first marriage, she never would’ve met Gregory, the man Klara tells me makes her feel loved in ways her first husband never managed to.
A great husband and an even better stepfather, Klara’s second chance at a loving marriage eventually gave her the happy family she’d fought so hard to have before.
Last I heard, Adam was still single, but he never struck me as someone who was worried about it. He never saw any shame in things like divorce, or trying again and again until he gets love right. As long as he has the freedom, he’s willing to spend the rest of his life trying to find the one.
And that’s just not something you can do if you don’t know when to move on.
After all, there may be love in holding, but there is also love in letting go.
