What happens when you train your heart to become as hard as steel?
For years, I’ve held files with divorce petitions and reports. People who were once in love now seek to tear each other down using whatever means possible. One line reads, “My wife, who now lives with her parents, would abuse me whenever we just had a simple talk.” They both want one thing, and that is—to go their separate ways.
Christine had been in and out of seven different relationships. At 35, she was certain she might never find love. She deleted the dating apps from her phone and regularly forgot what day of the week it was. She busied herself with work and kept her mind occupied with other things—but not love.
She became completely untethered from love when her last fiancé died in a car accident. To her, he was everything. He meant the whole world to her, and she never thought of a better man to be with than “him”—the dead. She remembered him every day with her eyes lined with tears—and we all should get more of this, remembering the legacy that a loved one left behind. However, truly learning to move on and keeping these people in our hearts while unmasking the remaining beauties in life would mean thinking on a bigger timescale.
A relationship can be profitable or unprofitable, and sometimes, beyond these losses, negative emotions can burst out with subconscious stretches of regret from past failures or experiences. Christine pinned her life down to a person she lost to death—it was unprofitable, but then she faced a deeper fear: to ever love again. She assumed that she was better off single and alone. The death of someone she loved was, in fact, traumatizing, but then again, her resolve to never love again was even more destructive.
Love can’t fix your life, but it can nurture you from the inside out.
Truly loving a person is a journey, and whether or not it gets terminated unexpectedly or painfully, love lets you tend to the wilting flowers in your life’s garden—the wilted flowers that were hidden from the wonders of sunlight and exposed to the dangers of weeds. Love can’t fix your life, but it can nurture you from the inside out. Breaks are necessary, and some people have to use the exit door anyway; however, that shouldn’t close you off to bigger opportunities and blessings.
Love can’t fix your life, but it can nurture you from the inside out. Breaks are necessary, and some people have to use the exit door anyway
At 35, Christine took a self-funded sabbatical to New York. She needed to be away from everything that reminded her of her present state and her life’s biggest loss. It had been two years since he died, but she never spent a day without deliberately giving her heart to pain and thorns. She went to a coffee shop somewhere in Albany, New York, and bumped into someone. He was just someone she mistakenly jolted toward, but it lit a spark she hadn’t felt in years.
For just a moment, she allowed her heart to flutter and flurry with excitement, but at that spot, she reminded herself that she wasn’t ready to love again.
Nearly all of the one-time heartbroken and shattered recall telling themselves to never love someone again. Several thought they’d reap the same results should they make the mistake of opening their hearts. The few who tried found themselves struggling to flow in a new relationship.
A lot of people who have expelled love from their lives did so in an emotional state of breakdown and debilitation. They progressed with these thoughts and eventually became an expression of their long-caged fears. Nkiru is another perfect example.
Christine found herself staring at the young man she bumped into at the coffee shop. Good for her, she wasn’t alone in the staring game, and they ended up exchanging pleasantries formally. Fast forward to when they got married in Nigeria after just six months of courtship. Christine confessed that she had a difficult time really getting into the relationship. She loved him, but there was another side of her that doubted the end result of their meeting. She became free the moment she deliberately told herself that it was enough living in the dark—the dark that made life seem like it could still make sense without love.
Her life was doing fine even while she was single, and love is never an escape route from a broken reality. However, telling herself that love wasn’t for her was self-deceit, self-antagonistic, and kept her trapped within herself for so long.
Life without love and romance is plausible but also self-destructive, especially when coming from a place of the past. Christine said that the week after she got married was pure excitement for her—a feeling that had been alien to her life for years. The hardest part about choosing not to love is self-denial. You deny yourself what you deserve and should get. But hopefully, when it ends, you’ll be better equipped to face the disappointments ahead—and to prioritize your life outside the past.
