Grieving for lost love (Part 2 of 4 parts)

For more than 40 years, I have been counseling lovers and troubled married people. Rarely do they come to me with questions about how to make a healthy relationship more solid. Just as few people are interested in seeing a doctor about how to live a healthy lifestyle, neither are couples apt to see a counselor unless there is a problem.

When your love relationship falls apart, the first feeling that comes over you is one of disbelief. You can’t believe that this is happening to you. You were so sure of your love, your partner’s love for you that you sit there stunned and disbelieving that it is over.

You have to face the fact that it’s over because he is gone, but you cannot accept it. There is a measure of denial. And the denial is greater if you are not the initiator of the separation. You feel it more because it (the separation) was imposed upon you.

The initiator will surely be wounded too because any relationship where there was true love was invested in by both lovers. Now that it is over, both feel a sense of loss. Time, emotional involvement, the giving of oneself, the shattered expectations and the broken dreams all make for a bleeding heart regardless of who initiates the breakup.

But if you are the one who is left behind, the hurt is more deeply felt. If you still have a measure of love in your heart for the one who abandons you, the painful feelings are much greater.

So is the confusion. When you fell in love, you were sure it would last forever. It was a failure-proof love. Though relationships were dying all around you, yours wasn’t like theirs. Yours was special, unique and you were sure it would stand the test of time.

The more you believed it was impossible for your love to fail, the greater the pain and confusion. When love works, it is the most wonderful experience humans can have. When, however, it fails, it is the most hurtful experience a person can bear besides the death of a loved one.

We say that lovers are madly in love. Yes, love can be crazy, absolutely insane. It can be so blind that it becomes emotionally suicidal. The most unlikely persons fall in love and everyone knows it won’t work except the two lovers. Once in a while they prove the world wrong, but most often the relationship is bound to die and it does die a bloody death. –Bob Garon, Manila Times

More tomorrow

If you have problems about drugs, alcohol and behavior/attitude call my office at 820-6107 or 825-1771 or e-mail me at goldenvalues­­_school@yahoo.com.ph or write me at P.O. Box 2099 MCPO, Makati City.