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Divorce isn’t failure. It’s success.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Not for me, but for a couple of people nearby.
The word I hear so often when it comes to the end of a relationship is ‘failure’.
What?!?
The WHOLE relationship was a failure?
I can’t believe that, because you would never have married them or stayed with them this long.
A relationship hasn’t failed because it’s ended. It’s just ended. We can be so quick to mark something failed because it’s ended. Even businesses or being fired from a job. We forget to look at all the good things that happened up until that point. We forget that there’s two people (typically) in a relationship and BOTH are responsible for making it work.
Any kind of relationship, whether romantic or otherwise does not depend solely on one person to invest in, aside from the first few years of parenting I suppose.
The end of something does not deem it a failure. Where you have chosen to leave a marriage or relationship because you are no longer happy, loved, cherished and having needs met, you haven’t failed.
In my opinion you’ve succeeded.
You’ve stood up and demanded more for yourself. You’ve recognised your self worth, your value and your needs.
You have empowered yourself to lift your head from the sand and look at what’s wrong and if it’s salvageable and you have faced the brutal reality that it isn’t. You are looking change square in the eye, something every single person I’ve met dislikes to one degree or another, (it’s to do with evolution but that’s another post!) and asked it to enter your life.
You’ve stepped out of a comfort zone and into a wilderness of break up, with all the financial insecurity, change in living situation that brings.
You’ve relinquished an uncomfortable comfort and acknowledged that rubbing along or moments of good isn’t enough, and that being single is better than being partnered.
If that doesn’t make you the one of the bravest badasses in the world I don’t know what will.
And you may be reading this blog thinking I didn’t choose it, they did. This doesn’t apply to me. I’m the one rejected. I don’t want to step out of the comfort zone, it was forced upon me and I don’t know what I did wrong etc.
Let me tell you this. If that’s you, if you are nursing rejecting and wounding, if you have been blindsided by a break up; you are the biggest badass that existed. Because you have been forced into a period of hurt and healing, but more importantly reflection. Looking at the relationship for clues of the intention. Was everything as rosy as you thought or were there signs?
And you’re going to face those questions, and they’re going to hurt potentially, but you know what? You’re going to rise up knowing you deserve more. You deserve value and you deserve to be cherished too.
We all do.
Of course this isn’t a black and white subject, but with all relationship breakdowns, we have to look at our own behaviour and be honest with ourselves. What can we learn from it? What can we take forward into a new relationship and what can we leave behind? Do we need to go to therapy to understand our relational patterns so we don’t repeat a cycle? What change must we implement?
For me, the end of your relationship isn’t a failure. It has the potential to be the greatest success you’ve ever known.
Take care
H x
