GRIEVING A LOST RELATIONSHIP

GRIEVING A LOST RELATIONSHIP

A breakup, a separation, a divorce, or some painful combination of all three can bring real, true-blue grief,

even though we don’t always recognize it that way. When a relationship ends, you aren’t simply grieving

the person who is no longer part of your everyday life. You may be grieving the life you had together, the

life you thought you were going to have, the family you created, or the family you thought you would have.

You grieve the future you planned, or even the person you thought you knew and loved.

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Sometimes, you are grieving all of it at once. This kind of grief can be especially difficult because it doesn’t

always arrive with the same understanding or compassion we give other kinds of loss. There may be no

sympathy cards or flowers on the doorstep, no bereavement leave from work, and no moment when the

people around you stop and acknowledge that something important in your life has ended. Because nobody died.

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Not really. But in many ways, it can feel like they did. The person you talked to every day may suddenly be absent from your everyday life, while the house feels different, weekends look different, holidays change, friendships shift, finances become complicated, and plans that once seemed certain disappear almost overnight. If you have children together, you may also be adjusting to days when they are with you and days when they are not, creating an entirely new rhythm for a family you never expected to divide between two homes.

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And then there are all the little losses that other people may never see.

You can miss the inside jokes, the traditions, the familiar routines, the person you automatically reached for when something happened, and the comfort of believing you knew what next year, five years from now, or even old age together might look like.

You aren’t only grieving a relationship. Sometimes you are grieving an entire version of your life and the future you had already begun living in your imagination.

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GRIEVING SOMEONE WHO IS STILL HERE

Perhaps one of the strangest things about relationship grief is that the person you are grieving may still be very much alive, moving through the world and building a life that no longer includes you in the way it once did. You might still see them, talk to them, exchange your children in a parking lot, sit across from them in a mediator’s office, hear about them through friends, see pieces of their life on social media, or eventually watch them fall in love with someone else.

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There can be something incredibly painful about grieving someone who still exists but no longer occupies the place they once held in your life, because there isn’t always a clean goodbye or a clear moment when you know the grieving is supposed to begin.

And sometimes, as time passes, you realize you aren’t only grieving the person who left.

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You may also be grieving the person you believed they were, the promises you believed, the relationship you thought you had, or the version of them you kept hoping would eventually become what you needed.

That is grief, too.

YOU CAN CHOOSE TO LEAVE AND STILL GRIEVE

We sometimes assume that the person who chooses to end a relationship should somehow hurt less, as though making the decision means they stopped loving, caring, hoping, or wishing things could have turned out differently. But you can know that a relationship needs to end and still wish with everything in you that it hadn’t come to that.

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You can feel relieved and devastated at the same time. You can miss someone and know you should never be together again. You can remember wonderful moments without forgetting the painful ones, and you can know with absolute certainty that leaving was the right decision while still grieving everything that decision cost you. Those feelings don’t contradict one another.

They are part of what makes relationship grief so complicated.

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FROM GET REAL ABOUT™ GRIEF

[EXCERPT FROM DIVORCE CHAPTER COMING SOON]

Excerpted from GET REAL ABOUT™ GRIEF by Jennifer Barrette

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THE END OF A RELATIONSHIP ISN’T THE END OF YOUR STORY

When a relationship ends, it can be tempting to measure the entire experience by what didn’t work and to turn the ending inward: the marriage failed, the relationship failed, somehow I failed. But an ending does not erase everything that came before it, and it certainly does not get to decide everything that comes after it.

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You are allowed to grieve what you lost while still recognizing what you gained. You are allowed to be angry about what happened and still miss some of what you had. You are allowed to treasure good memories without rewriting the painful ones, and you are allowed to mourn the future you thought you were going to have while slowly beginning to imagine a different one.

Because different does not have to mean less.

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Sometimes the life we never imagined for ourselves eventually becomes the life we never knew we needed, and sometimes what feels like the ending of everything is really the beginning of discovering who we are, what we want, and what we are capable of creating next. A relationship may be ending.

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Your story isn’t. If you would like to share your Divorce story, click the link below: 

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