Coming Apart: Why Relationships End and How to Live Through the Ending of Yours (new ed) by Daphne Rose Kingma

Author:Daphne Rose Kingma [Kingma, Daphne Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
Published: 2012-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Just Because You Didn't Ask for It Doesn't Mean You Don't Want It

Just as the instigator can get caught short by contacting positive feelings about the relationship after deciding to end it, so also does the “victim” have a surprising stage to go through. The person who is being informed that the relationship is over, the poor baby who is being left, often languishes longer in each of the early stages I've already described, especially the “I can't believe this is happening to me” stage. Although this person hasn't been going through all the thought processes at a conscious level—that, yes, the relationship is over—finally, he or she does get the message. Following this acknowledgment, there is a shift in which the person being left connects with the possibilities that exist beyond the end of the relationship. In other words, this person is almost glad it happened.

This is always very surprising.

I think the reason this happens is that the person who is being left gets thrust very profoundly into grieving right away: “Oh, I remember all the nice times. Oh, what about the children?” “Oh, but I love you. Oh, how can this be happening? I'll be lost without you. I'll die. I'll never love again.” The “victim” is forced into deep grief and, as a consequence, into the cleansing that grieving provides and then is ready to begin again. These people find that on the other side of the grief there is always a new beginning. When the “victim” is finished with grieving, he or she is often amazed to have stumbled into it.

“I thought I would die,” one woman said, “I mean really, literally die, when he told me he was leaving. I just couldn't conceptualize life without him—after twenty-four years of sleeping naked next to him. But somehow I got through all those suicide days one day at a time. Then one day I realized, hey, I'm still alive, there actually are some good things about living and I might as well see what there is to do with myself.

“That was the turning point for me. Suddenly I stopped feeling like a victim and I had this wonderful sensation that someone had given me another chance, a chance to experience life in a way I had never expected—as a single woman, with my own consciousness, as the architect for all my choices. I had married ‘till death do us part' and I'd never expected that I would again experience life on my own.

“I discovered that the life I wanted to lead on my own was very different from the life I'd been leading with him. His leaving was the beginning of my development as a person. In a way, I really thank him.”

This, by the way, is often the theme of those who have “been left”: surprising gratitude. Many people who have had their relationships ripped away from them later on feel that the opportunities and the development that followed included things that they never would have had the courage to pursue for themselves had they not been “abandoned.

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