“Maybe our mistakes are what make our fate.” ~ Carrie Bradshaw

Perhaps we need to be broken first before we can finally become whole.

Painful love is the worst kind of heartbreak. It’s the one we had such high hopes for, the one we gambled everything for—only to find it was a bet that would never be won.

So we break into a million small pieces of ourselves and wonder how we could have gotten it so wrong.

We make mistakes in love.

We choose people based on the lessons that our souls need to learn without realizing that it’s usually those difficult lessons we need to experience the most.

We can’t be changed by ease and we can’t have our minds broken open by the mundane—instead it can only happen when we are left with nothing but ourselves and our regrets.

Maybe there is no such thing as a mistake if we indeed needed it to learn more about who we are and how we love, but still there are those loves we wish we could rewind and just take back. The ones whose endings were too painful for us to want to permanently claim as part of our history.

But no matter how much we wished that this love was something other than what it was, it will never change the reality that the only reason we needed this love in our lives was to break our hearts.

The thing is, we need that big mistake to help propel us toward the love of our life.

We need to be broken in order to find out how we want to put ourselves back together.

Often times the biggest mistake of our lives is a relationship that we should have walked away from the minute it began—or at the very least should have let go of long before we actually did, and way before it all went downhill.

But we didn’t, and it’s not because that love was meant to be, but because without it we might never have realized what love truly is.

We always have the choice to stay in a relationship that is a constant battle of wills and ideals. Yet, no matter how many times we hope it will end differently, or just maybe work this time around—it never does.

This is because it’s not meant to.

Our mistake is meant to end, usually bitterly, and often catastrophically. Its purpose is to rock us to our core and challenge our very self and our beliefs about love.

We are meant to question what went wrong, and to wonder what love really means to us. This isn’t an overnight process , but one that we need to take the time to immerse ourselves in until we no longer hide from the truth that our hearts whisper.

It’s a state of healing that lets us know that we can send someone our love, but we can also walk away with our heads high and our faith strong knowing that we haven’t messed up the best thing we ever had.

Because the love of our life is out there waiting for us and when we meet there will be no question about why we needed to have our hearts broken in the way we did.

There won’t be battles to conquer, or qualities to be changed. There won’t be unfulfilled needs, or drama around every corner. In reality, this love is going to show us why none of our previous relationships worked out.

Because all along they were only leading us to this—the person who was created just for us, and somehow through the meandering paths that life takes, ended up not being perfect, but still being perfect for us.

Our worst mistake and our deepest heartbreak is only meant to help lead us to the love of our life—because without it, we might never know what that actually looks like.

The love of our life only comes when we are ready for it. When we have broken apart who we thought we should be and instead embraced who we are. This love only appears when we have gained the ability to believe that we deserve what we want.

The love of our life won’t look or feel like anything we’ve ever experienced. It might come softly, or it might even enter as a wrecking ball. It may come dressed as friendship, or perhaps something so hot we thought for sure we would get burned. But, because of that great mistake we are not the same people we once were, so we will approach love differently as well.

We will look for the peace instead of the intensity of the storm.

We will allow ourselves to gaze past the superficial and instead appreciate the energy that this person brings into our lives, reveling in the new-found depths of connection that we are experiencing.

Slowly we will realize that it’s not necessarily who someone is, but rather what type of person they bring out in us that determines whether it’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love.

With time, an understanding develops that love should not only feel like it adds value to our lives, but it should also help us become the best possible version of ourselves.

Only a great love can raise us to greatness.

And that’s the thing about the love of our life—it may not end up being who we thought it was, and it may still not come without challenges, but there is just something about it that makes us want to be better.

It’s a love that inspires us, and shows us that perhaps we aren’t scared at all, and that just maybe we haven’t screwed up as badly as we thought we had.

Because finally we realize that our “great mistake” was really a north star all along, leading us to the love of our life.

“Sometimes the bad things that happen in our lives put us directly on the path to the best things that will ever happen to us.” ~ curiano.com

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Relephant:

We Only Fall in Love with 3 People in Our Lifetime—Each One for a Specific Reason.

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Author: Kate Rose

Image: YouTube

Editor: Nicole Cameron