We spend so long getting to know someone before we commit to a relationship with them, yet when we break up its simply over, it ends. What if we applied the same mindset to a break up and "un-dated" someone?
Many have said that it takes the length of a relationship to heal from the relationship, that sounds like an incredible but not impossibly theory. I got to thinking about how long we spend in the beginning of a relationship when we make a decision to invest in someone and allow them into our lives and vice versa. This is not a decision that we take lightly and we can spend months, even years deciding whether or not someone is worthy of having our all and that we are worthy of having theirs.
Where a break up occurs, they can come on quite sudden, it can happen almost overnight in some cases, though, one party has been thinking about it for a while longer than the other, it can be quite a one-sided occasion. Where a relationship is virtually taken away from a person, this can leave quite an empty feeling for quite some time after. If two people actively worked towards ending their relationship together, would the pain of the separation lessen? Are we capable of actively ending out relationships and being adults about it? Is it just a cultural "norm" that has been established over time to end relationships the way we do?
Many people say that it takes the length of relationship to heal from the loss of it, when someone first told me this I was in disbelief. "I don't have that kind of time!" I said, I NEED to move on! Need, as we know comes from Ego, choice however does not. We should never need to do anything; everything in life should be a choice, in an ideal world of course. Sadly though, where the ending of a relationship is concerned, it is often not a choice for one parry at lease, or sometimes both can feel that it needs to end for one reason or another.
What would a world or scenario look like where people made a decision to begin to let their relationship end slowly, where they allowed the other party time to miss their absence, to yearn for them? Would two people actually decide that they no longer wanted to be in each others lives in the same capacity or would it change our outlooks on love, relationships and various aspects of life all together? I've known of couples over the years who have decided to take breaks from each other to trial a separation at points where each individual was wanting to grow, as we all do. It's not always practical to grow with someone; sometimes we do need time apart. From those that I've spoken to, there seems to be no right or wrong way, it is a case by case basis and as we know, everyone is different.
I still come back to how when we spy that person across the street or across the room and our stomachs start to flutter, this is often and stereotypically how partnerships begin. Where those butterflies start to stop fluttering around and a knot almost appears in our stomachs where the buzz once was, surely this is the corresponding feeling that we all get and should all be listening to and communicating when we feel its time to leave? Will we ever know I wonder?