We’ve all faced difficult relationship choices and hard goodbyes.
We meet someone – a friend, coworker, business partner, romantic partner– and they just feel right.
There’s a whole lot of neurological reasons why that happens that I won’t get into, except to say that we meet people energetically where we’re at. So if you’re attracted to someone – not just romantically but in friendship, kinship, or business – it means that they are at a similar place in their own journey through life.
In simplest terms, you are drawn to those with whom you have the most in common. Makes sense, right? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
We change over time.
As our character grows and matures, who we are drawn to in relationship grows and matures as well. And there’s no guarantee that the people around us are growing and maturing at the same pace and direction.
And this is when difficult relationship choices and hard goodbyes occur.
It’s all a completely normal part of life. But that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier.
Changing the status of a relationship or saying goodbye – that’s hard! Even if we know it’s the best thing for everyone involved.
How I’ve learned to make these difficult transitions more tolerable:
Pull back. What does this mean?
When we are struggling, we tend to get really up close and personal with our emotions. We are SAD, capital S-A-D. We are MAD. We are DISAPPOINTED. We are SCARED.
We are so close to those feelings that they cloud out everything else, making it difficult to see the whole picture.
But if we pull back, we can see that the relationship has changed, because one or both people have grown or matured in a different direction.
It makes sense that when this happens the nature of your relationships will change. And unfortunately, if you’re the one doing the growing, it’s probably more than just one. When we experience a big life shift with a lot of personal growth, it impacts all our relationships.
So, my recommendation when this happens is to pull back. Don’t ignore your emotions. They serve an important purpose. But we should look towards our emotions to inform our choices, not drive our choices.
Who is driving the car?
Imagine you are taking your feelings on a road trip. Your emotions should ride in the back seat, not drive the car.
When our emotions are driving the car, they are right in our face, and we can’t see the road.
When we pull back from all the big feelings and relegate the emotions in the back seat, we can see the path forward.
What happens when we pull back?
We can see all the good things about the person that drew us into relationship with them in the first place, which is grace.
We can see all the ways they still need to grow, which is accountability.
And we can see where we need to move in a different direction, which is boundaries.
And of course, Boundaries, Accountability, and Grace are the Three Pillars of Redefining Love.
By pulling back, we are able to determine what space we take up in the world, and draw firm boundaries around where we end and others begin.