The Big Lessons in Love – Over Thirty and Single

So – how is it that I ended up in my mid-thirties and single? Well, it’s not an easy road I went down.  I got a little bruised in my twenties and then I got my butt kicked in my thirties. 

Looking back I realize I never gave myself time to allow hindsight to do its thing. I never gave myself time to learn from each failed relationship. 

So here are the big things I learned looking back... way back!

I love this saying...

Time between relationships: It takes time after a hard break-up to really figure out who you are. I think it’s inevitable that you adapt in a relationship - compromise and morph into part of a greater whole. You pick up new hobbies, new friends, new perspectives, new ideas, insights, new likes and dislikes. Sometimes relationships require you to relocate, change jobs, etc. Sometimes that’s amazing and that’s when relationships last. And sometimes it’s not amazing at all. Sometimes you change too much of you are to make a relationship work. The problem for me is that I never gave myself enough time to really be me again. Overtime I became this amalgamation of perspectives, insights, ideas that were not even wholly mine - jumping into one relationship after another. I was basically in a perpetual rebound for years!

Who wants my ball of love?! When a relationships ends its hard to admit that you are going to have to start from scratch with someone new. There's a desire sometimes to pick up right where you left off with the next so and so. (Which never works!)

Here - have my ball
of love... please!!!

Here is my analogy for love and break-ups. When you are in a relationship and you love your significant another you essentially hand them your love - lets call it a ball of love. When you hand it to them its clean and filled with possibilities! When it ends, they essentially hand that love right back to you and when they hand it back to you its filled with all the good and the bad of your relationship. So now you're holding this ball of love and you don't know what to do with it... so you try handing it off to the next willing person.  "Here, have this ball of love." Normal, well conditioned people run from this screaming - they don't want your used ball of love, all weighted down with the "stuff" of  a past relationship. Other people may accept your ball of love and say, "Oh goodie, a ball of love for me, just what I was missing!" And now you feel better because someone has taken your rejected love off of your hands... everyone wins, right?! Wrong! You have just handed someone love filled with stuff that didn't really belong to them and they accepted it. This is called a rebound. Someone almost always gets hurt in this scenario.... and you can end up right back where you started!

So what the heck are you supposed to do with this ball of rejected love?! This is going to sound corny - but you need to take the time to let all the "stuff" of that past relationship wash itself out of your ball of love. That way when you meet the next right so and so you can hand them a shiney, clean ball of love.

I can make this fit!!!

Forcing a round peg in a square hole: The final major issue I faced is that I’m a fighter who feels like I can make anything work... even when it makes no sense to try and do so. There were times right in the beginning of a relationship that it was clearly not going to work, but did I walk away, save time, save energy? Hell no! I fought. I poured myself entirely into the void of inevitability – I compromised myself into all sorts of shapes and sizes to try and make my relationships work...  I am the queen of this scenario:

Me: I want XYZ out of life. 

Dude: Oh - well I want ABC out of life.

Me: Hum... that doesn't fit. It's cool, you can change. 

Or even worse, I would try and change. Both would always lead to an epic fail. (I would once again be holding my rejected ball of love...)

Taking my life back by force!

By the time Baby Daddy came around at the age of 33 I had morphed and whiplashed myself into a frenzy and I had decided the only way to get back on track was to “over-correct” if you will. Refuse to compromise. Refuse to adapt. Refuse to be swept off my feet. Refuse to work hard. I decided I would just be whomever and whatever I wanted to be in a moment, regardless of what that meant for love. Does the term hard bitter bitch come to mind? It came to my mind. But baby daddy stuck it out. He saw underneath the bitter and basically said, take your time and be who you need be. I’ll be here as your boyfriend or as your friend. Little did we know he’d be there as my baby daddy too!

Learn or repeat - those are
your options...

I want to be good at all the things I do in life. I want to be a good mother.  I want to be a good girlfriend/wife. I want to be a good employee. I want to be a good landlord. I think the only way to be all of the above is to make sure you are always being honest with yourself and being honest with others. When you're being truly honest with yourself life is often more simple, but goodness that's often very hard to do!