This is for anyone trying to live in the both/and.
Anyone trying to hold onto what was, and make room for what is.
Anyone who is moving forward with the lessons and love of their lived their experiences, not moving on from them.
I get more than a few emails from people who are in a very specific situation: they’ve lost their partner — to death, not a random misplacement — and they have also found themselves in a new relationship, with a big, new love.
One arrived with the same subject line you see here — remarried and so sad.
She is sad because she misses her first husband. And because she thinks that her sadness is an inconvenience to her new husband, that it invalidates her current happiness, that it proves that this love is just not as good as the one before it. She’s afraid to say her dead husband’s name, bring him up, cry.
Oh, man.
It must be a natural human inclination to try to weigh our love the same way we weigh our pain, to rank and sort them, arrange them in trophy case so everyone can see what we earned and how.
When I was younger and dumber, when I was careless with hearts — my own and others — I thought of love as a finite resource. When I was younger and dumber, when I was careless with hearts — my own and others — I thought of love as a finite resource. I minimized relationships as soon as they were over. It wasn’t love. It was nothing. It was silly.
It was silly of me to act that way! To pretend like the only love that counted was the one that lasted forever. Because what’s forever, anyway?
I always find a new way to reply to these messages, because every one of them reopens my own scars in a new way. Because I had this same fear when my husband died and I fell in love again: that it would be too much, that I would be too much. And for the wrong person, I would be. It would be.
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