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“If something makes you sad when it ends, it must have been pretty wonderful when it was happening.” ~ Rebecca (Mandy Moore) in “This Is Us”

I heard this quote on a show last night, and it really reached something deep inside of me.

When we go through a breakup, there are so many different emotions we may feel. Sometimes we feel happy to be out of the relationship and ready to move on. Sometimes we feel angry at either the other person or ourselves for things that led to the breakup. Sometimes we may feel indifference because the relationship got to a point where we didn’t care one way or the other about it.

But the hardest one by far is where we feel a deep and profound sadness and a loss that feels close to that of a death after a breakup. When we feel like all of our hopes and dreams that we had in the beginning have been reduced down to tears and pain in the end. Because we still love this person and they may still love us and that love goes so much deeper and is something more than the butterflies in the stomach, the “in love” feeling, that it started out as.

It can be so painful that we can’t eat or sleep, and our minds are flooded with thoughts and memories of this person that we just can’t seem to let go of. Our bodies physically ache from the absence of them.

Everything we hoped for with them is now gone. The bright future that we saw with this person abruptly stopped—and along with it the future we saw for ourselves. We may feel that it shouldn’t have been this way, that this was not how our love story was supposed to end, that it shouldn’t have ended.

Maybe we try to tell ourselves that it is for the better, but that doesn’t make it any easier or make us forget them. And wouldn’t that be easier? If there was a button we could push that would wipe away the memories of this person that we carry in our hearts—and with it the pain we are now feeling.

But for whatever reason, what either of you may want or need in a relationship is just not lining up at this time in your lives. So then the only decision is to go separate ways. This is a hard scenario to wrap our heads around, but it happens. It is happening to me as I write this.

I am desperately trying to make sense of how two people who love each other so much can’t seem to meet in the middle. But we haven’t been able to up to this point. So here we are. There are just no answers, and most likely there never will be. We can only learn and grow and remember all of the good things this beautiful human being brought to our lives, even though it ended too soon.

I carry this quote with me now as I try to figure out how to move forward. “If something makes you sad when it ends, it must have have been pretty wonderful…” and I am so sad, and it really was wonderful.

~