Why We Still Love If you could see the future, would you still take the leap?

When people bring a pet into their home, they do so knowing that it's probably going to end badly. By that I mean that pets don't have the same life span as humans,
so the chances of your pet outliving you are pretty slim.

But you don't think about that when you get a puppy or kitten. You're just happy and amazed at your little furball. And over the years, over the span of their life, you just enjoy them and love them.
And then they get old, or sick, or old and sick. And your heart breaks. But you knew this day was coming the day you brought him or her home from the shelter. (I hope it was from the shelter.) You knew, on some level, that this precious life would end before yours. And still you made the choice to love it—knowing it would end badly.
If you had someone saying that to you on the day you go get your pet, would you still have done it?
If in every situation you've been in with a fellow human that has ended badly, would you still have loved if you could have seen the future—the one that ends badly?
I think that most of us would still make that choice.
I think of this question sometimes about my late husband, Michael. Would I have fallen in love with him knowing he would die long before his time and I would be left with this crushing grief? Well, of course I would.
I think that about my failed reunification with my birth mother. Would I do it again if I knew it would result in a second, more horrific rejection? I think I would. Even though I said, when I was searching for her, that I couldn't handle a second rejection, I did handle it and I have wonderful relationships with my cousins that are bittersweet for me. But I like knowing where I come from. And I did handle the second rejection. It wasn't easy and I had a terrible time of it, but I handled the one thing I said I couldn't.
I think about my first marriage and, though it was an awful relationship and a worse divorce, I have my children and grandchildren as the result of that unhappy union. I can't say I wouldn't do it again.
Even after not-so-great relationships most people still would choose to love, the way they're able to at that point in life.

When it ends badly, there is a solution. The human mind is designed to process loss.  The process is called grief. Grief is the healing feeling. When you lose something, or someone, your mind takes over to process the loss. You may feel angry, hurt, confused, anxious, and many other things. That is your mind putting your world back in order for you to function. It may not feel like a great healing, but it is. The worst thing we can do is shut down the grief process. It's necessary and natural to feel the loss, heal the loss, and move on. Let your grief happen. It will prepare you for the next time.
You grieve, you incorporate the good into you, and you release the bad. You go on. If you do your grief work, you become a stronger, happier person. You're not full of fear because you have weathered the storm before. You may be gun shy for a while, but you know that, given the choice, you will love again—even if a crystal ball says it will end badly.

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With our pets, we bury one, wait a while and, before you know it, we are scouting for another one.
The heart learns its lessons, but it wants to be open to love. When you're grieving, you don't understand how you could ever be open to love again. And if you are open, how will you know if this will be a losing proposition or not? Sometimes you can't know.
But you love anyway.

To love is a choice. It's often a choice that ends in heartache. But it's a choice. And surviving the ending and finding your way into the light where you will love again is also a choice.
Loving becomes easier and more fulfilling when you do your work and embrace the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. Grief work makes you not afraid. Grief work allows you to continue to choose to love.
When we don't do our grief work, our losses pile up and we become afraid. We build walls and defenses. We think, "I just can't take it if it doesn't work out." We huddle into our emotional overcoats and try to will the world away. We may become insecure and accuse people of things they're not doing, or we may choose the wrong people and then say, "See? See! I was right!  No one can be trusted!" And the real truth is that we cannot be trusted with our own hearts. We are moving against our own interest when we become self-fulfilling prophecies. We either choose people who will hurt us, or put people into such defensive positions that they leave. And then we yell, I WAS RIGHT!

When we do our grief work, we learn that it is true that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. When we do our grief work, we are not afraid to lose, and therefore not afraid to love. We don't want things to end, but we know that if they do, we'll be okay.  We learn to make healthy choices and we learn to walk away when things are not good enough for us. We never again stay in a bad relationship just because a bad relationship hurts less than facing all that unresolved loss that flies up in our face when we haven't faced it.

Like it says in Getting Past Your Breakup, unresolved losses pile up and make our lives smaller and narrower. Thinking of all of our losses is akin to putting our hand on a hot stove. We recoil in horror at the thought of allowing all that unresolved loss to come pouring in. But we can take the losses a little bit at a time and truly resolve them by journaling, by facing them, by doing our inventories, and by talking, really talking, about them.

The human spirit wants to love. It has to love. It dies without love. And most of the time that choice to love doesn't go that well. Because even in the very best of relationships, chances are you are not going to pass from this world at the same time. One of you is most likely going to be grieving the loss of the other some day in the future.
But if you do your work and move on, you can choose your next relationship from a position of strength. You can choose from a position of reality, knowing that life is short and you want to surround yourself with the very best.

Loss is a part of life. And we choose to lose when we choose to love. But love's power, love's softening of the harshness of life, makes it worth it. And if you do your grief work now you will find better loves, and love that is more true than you've ever known. And that is why you choose to do the work, to heal and become whole, because without it you will be forever afraid and choose to not love.
Choosing your recovery is saying yes to the next time. Saying yes to a future full of love. Saying yes to the possible loss of the other.

Source: Askold Romanov/istockphoto

The work is so important because when you do it you can say yes to better people, to stronger people, to more loving people.
Life goes on. Love happens. Take advantage of the healing time to heal in ways that allow the love to happen from very loving people. Allow your heart to break and then allow it to heal itself through writing, tears, talking, and feeling your feelings.
Choose to love and be loved. By doing the work to make you strong enough to do that, you can choose and be okay with it. No matter what happens.
You CAN do it.