Sorry folks, I do not have the answer, but if someone finds the answer, please let me know! When I was a little girl, I dreamt of a fairy tale wedding. As life progressed, I saw adults around me be miserable in their marriages, I started to think that maybe marriage was not as pretty as the TV and movies made it seem. I did not have good role models for what a healthy and happy relationship should be. It seemed you had to choose between a) be single, which was regarded as being alone (aka lonely), in addition to being shun for not wanting to be in a relationship, less be married, or b) be in an unhappy relationship, which meant happy on the outside, but unhappy (and probably lonely) on the inside. It was confusing and it created a distorted perception of what a romantic relationship should (or could) be.

When I ventured out into my own relationship experiences, I found out the hard way that relationships can be difficult and painful or as the Bee Gee’s song says, “…I was never told about the sorrow”. I have had my share of crappy relationships. There were the relationships where they tried to change me, or the ones that let their addictions overrun them and by default me. Let us not forget the ones that were so emotionally damaged, that were incapable of being present in the relationship. Lastly there were the ones that just pretended to be present in the relationship, because they did not know how to be part of, not just in the relationship, and to make matters worse, they did not speak up about their uncertainty. We all have our stories, some sound like scripts from a romantic Hollywood movie, others are unique and/or strange, but they are our stories and we ended the stories with battle scars, but also with wisdom gained from each of them.

I am grateful that I have learned something from every one of my dysfunctional relationships.  However,  I did not learn the individual lessons as they happened in each independent relationship, nor did I learn them shortly even shortly after it was all said and done. I only recently learned most (if not all) of them, in one big swoop!  The lessons that I was meant to learn within each failed relationship only became clear to me in the last three months. The most important thing I have learned is that I am emotionally dysfunctional and therefore attract an equal (or sometimes worse). I learned that issues I permitted to exist caused the problems within my relationships. I learned that self-realization could be disruptive to a relationship that is not rooted in honesty within us as individuals and as partners in a relationship. I learned that I have the ability to become emotionally sound and have clarity and compassion for myself first, and then for others. I have a firm belief that the Muhammad Ali quote “Impossible, is nothing” is true. It is within this belief that I rest my confidence that I am already manifesting emotional growth and maturity, and soon will be able to actively participate in a healthy and happy relationship.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in the eye of a life hurricane that caused emotional devastation all around me. I am now on the outskirts of that storm, my once unyielding and resilient relation-ship is now tattered, and nearly in pieces. The truth of the situation is I cannot repair, rebuild and man the ship alone, so the most likely ending for this ship is for it to sink to bottom. I am fighting back tears as I type this, mostly because I can’t see what I am typing if I’m blinded by my tears, but because it is that real, that raw, and the hurricane has not completely died down. As you might imagine, the relationship lessons I have recently accepted, remind me to not be in any hurry to jump out of this nearly sunken relation-ship into another (potentially) unstable relation-ship. With my new-found knowledge I feel I would much rather float in my one-man lifeboat alone, maybe try to catch some rays and get a nice tan, daydream of all the possibilities my future holds and all the while gain the skills I need to succeed in the next relation-ship that sail’s my way.

Overall, I know I seem calm right about now. However, I think it might be the calm before the emotional storm that is following the life hurricane. I am certain the storm is inching closer each day, so I find myself preparing my little lifeboat to face the uncertainty of the storm. As frightening as a strong storm can be, we can all rest assured that even the most turbulent and scary storms will always pass. Has anyone ever heard of a storm that does not pass or does not die down? My reality at this moment is that there is no way to identify the magnitude of the emotional storm, because there is no Doppler radar for this type of storm. However, I know I can still prepare myself to survive the storm with minimal damage and only require a few minor repairs. If you have your own life hurricane stories and advice on how to make it through an emotional storm, I would love to hear about it. I welcome all the wisdom the Universe has to offer me right now.

~Laura

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a song by The Bee Gees from their Trafalgar LP released in 1971. Al Green covered the song the following year on his Let’s Stay Together LP.