When Loving Someone Means Letting Them Go…

Well, well, well, what do we have here??? Ah, yes, a blog post about “letting go,” written in the aftermath of listening to Taylor Swift’s evermore on loop for just about 72 hours straight.

What I mean when I say that there are times that loving someone means letting them go is that, at least in my (limited) experience, letting someone go is, in and of itself, a parting act of love. It is when we hold on to people, when we fight and fight for a relationship that has ended— whether we are ready to admit it or not— that we hurt them (and ourselves). This doesn’t mean, however, that breakups are easy, or that every person needs to follow to same rules, or that you’re a horrible person if you try to re-ignite flames with an ex post-breakup. There is no perfect way to cope.

I think, as women in particular, we are bred to be perfectionists. To compete with one another. To be the girl who has it all going on: she’s smart, but not a know-it-all; she’s pretty, but she doesn’t act like she knows it; she’s thin, but boy! she can eat!; she’s ambitious, but still agreeable; she’s athletic, but not too jacked. This list goes on and on. BUT, what does this has to do with a breakup? Everything. We don’t want to be the “crazy ex-girlfriend.” We are so desperate to prove our worth— that we’re chill, that we aren’t too emotional. Even in our grief and our heartache, we receive the messaging that we should be concerned as to how those emotions will come across to other people. We are, more often than not, fearful of judgment from other women, and we are usually still concerned about what our ex’s opinion is of us, too. We want to know if we are hotter or cooler or better for them than our ex’s new romantic focus. We, all too often, see a breakup as competition. We want to handle it gracefully and keep a nice, clean break. We worry about who will move on first. We obsess over if they’re seeing someone new, if they’re feeling as sad or angry or heartbroken or numb as we are. We want to be good at grief. We don’t want to be the girls crying over their ex at a party. There are countless examples of messages telling us what not to do when processing a breakup. And, it would be woefully incorrect to say that men are not subject to their own set of messaging. Get back on the horse, bro. Man up. There’s plenty of other fish in the sea. Forget about her.

[Disclaimer: these examples tend to touch on more heterosexual dating norms— I do hope that they can be applied broadly, however. I do NOT want it to read as me pushing the a “every woman needs to ‘find a man’” narrative. I am hoping to address a broader issue that I have witnessed in myself as a woman, and it involves this internalized sense of competition with other women which often manifests as my own perfectionist tendencies.]

So, what do you do when your breakup involves both parties involved still loving each other?

The most comforting realization I had is that it is not a failure if love does not “conquer all.” Parting ways with someone that you still love is not weak. Letting go demonstrates strength. Grace. Courage. Confidence. In my situation, before we started dating, my ex-boyfriend was adamant that he would not enter a relationship with me unless I swore that I would make my college decision independent from where he was already set to go to school. To this day, I respect the disciplined love that he showed me through that decision: he wanted me to pursue my dream, even if it would place a country between us one day.

Fast forward, the country has entered a shutdown due to a pandemic and I have sent in my deposit for USC, but the whole timeline of senior year, graduation, and jetting off to college was thrown out the window, and, thus, the expiration date that had been attributed to our relationship was replaced with a big ol’ question mark. In a game-time decisions, with so many unknowns about the future of the pandemic, spikes in LA, and heaping spoonful of anxiety regarding being 3000 miles away from my family, I decided to live near my sister and cousin at Villanova University for my first semester, during which all my classes would be online. The hope was that I would get a semblance of a college experience and get some much desired independence. Consequently, this placed me just a short car ride away from my then boyfriend. At the onset of the semester, this was a source of great excitement for he and I: we’d get more time together!

Here’s the deal: no matter how much you love a person, you have to use your head and your heart. As we moved in to our new living situations and adjusted to all that it is to be a freshman in college in 2020, things just were not the same. The overpowering feeling I felt for him still? Love. My heart was still all in. My head, though, she started kicking into overdrive. She was slamming on the brakes, trying to assess the damage being done as he and I continued to pull away from each other. She started brainstorming ways to re-align with the heart, ways to have positive, hopeful thoughts about the future of our relationship. It was like waking up every day, seeing a ticking time bomb, and then trying to hit a “snooze” button on it. There is no snooze button.

Love is the most powerful force there is. I really believe that. That doesn’t mean, though, that love, particularly in the constraints of a romantic relationship, lasts forever. Love is energy. Energy is always conserved— it is neither created nor destroyed; love is never lost— it takes on new roles, just like we do. Love looks like letting go before two people are holding on by a thread. Love does not settle for comfortable. Love does not standby and let us stay stagnant so that we do not outgrow a significant other.

Letting go of someone that you are still in love with is the bravest act you can perform. The reasons for the breakup feel more logistical than demonstrative of the caliber of the relationship. Relinquishing your hold on someone that you still love is an incredible leap of faith because you’re faced afterwards with the question: “If love isn’t enough of a reason to stay, what is?”

Love alone isn’t reason enough to withstand a million duller blows to the heart a day as you wait for the day that you will part with your SO, just to keep them in your life another day longer. Love alone isn’t reason enough to override your brain’s warnings of why it is time. Love alone isn’t reason enough to hold someone back from going off on their own, from being the main character of their lives. Love alone isn’t reason enough to avoid the growth that is in store for you, the calls you are hearing to come home to yourself.

Could I argue that if my ex really loved me that he and I would still be together? Maybe, but I don’t buy it. Did I plan out infinite scenarios of my future with him, ones where we would date long-distance and end up together? You bet. Did I think that we’d be different and that we’d segue into a pretty little friendship shortly after breaking up? Of course I did. The hardest part of the breakup was letting go of the version of myself I had made in my head— the illusion of who I was because I was his girlfriend, and how that would take shape in all the fantasies I had created about our happy ending. Here is the mantra that continues to save my sanity, though: just because things could’ve gone differently, doesn’t mean they would have gone better.

Letting go of someone is a true, selfless act of love. It is surrendering control over the situation and ties to that person. It is trusting that the universe will take care of you both, that better days lie ahead, that love is never a waste of time.

I want you all to know, I completely floundered when trying to follow all of the “rules” of how to handle a breakup. You know yourself better than the Call Her Daddy host, Seventeen magazine, and any freakin’ rom-com does. If you’re going through a breakup, you’re going through enough— try to minimize any harm done to yourself and your ex, but don’t beat yourself up. It is hard. I promise that you are never alone, and that, with time, some hard a$$ inner work, manyyyy talks with your friends, and a whole lotta self love and compassion, you will get through this.

As much as this has suckeddddd, I am excited for the day when I am ready to fall in love all over again. Won’t that be fun? And, I’ll have all of these beautiful lessons to guide me through it when I do, because I loved and let go.