Fall In Love With Your Ex!
Was yours a love marriage? It’s a very common question that gets asked. At least here in North India where I live.
I’m an honest soul. So my answer is usually has been this – Yes of course ours was a love marriage. I fell in love with a someone and then married someone else. So, it was love- marriage.
Joke was on me after I found out that my wife’s was also a love-marriage.
That’s when I realised that life often leaves us with a lot of exes. Well, and I’m not just talking about the ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends but also ex-periences!
Rekindle your exes
It was 2013. We were blessed with our second child. A girl this time. Our son was four years old then. Although there was a lot of happiness and amazing feeling in the beginning, but slowly things begun to change – someone was feeling extremely jealous, neglected and left out. Longing to be with the lady of the house.
If you think I am talking about the first child, then well yes but even more so in this case it was me, the husband. Afterall, all my wife’s time was spent taking care of the baby, and whatever little was left went attending to our first child. I was nowhere in her priority list. Or so it seemed.
Before long, this sense of needing to be understood and cared for led me in the wrong direction. I got back in touch with an old flame back from college days. Even though this lady was well settled in the US with two kids of her own, but that didn’t stop us from talking daily, several times every day and for long hours!
We got so comfortable and so used to each other. Here was someone who apparently liked talking to me, valued me and was a shoulder that I could easily use to cry on!
But do you think this was the right train for me to be on?
No way! It was headed for a disaster. And yes, the disaster did eventually happen. The misunderstanding, the hurt and the loss of trust was a HUGE price to pay.
Rekindle your experiences to mine the jewels from them. What this ex taught me: “If you get on the wrong train, get off the nearest station, the longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be.”
Embrace your exes
How many years of experience do you have, I remember asking someone at work
30.
But you all of 30.
Yes, I started gaining experience the day I was born!
His answer stayed with me. Here was someone who took pride in himself just the way he was and valued every ex he has had.
People will have a lot to say about your exes. All the time. They could think you have too little or too much. But you have to embrace your exes because coz they make you who you are!
Make new exes
The pigeon never builds his nest on a tree! Do you know why? Well, because it never builds its nest on a tree. They carry on by building the nests in roshandans, verandahs, windows, places where hardly any other bird would ever do so. It made sense for their ancestors when they hung around the caves and mountains.
What are the things you continue to do because that’s what it has always done?
Be kind to yourself, get unstuck and make new exes to give yourself permission to write a new chapter in your life.
Close
There is a transformative power in your exes. Aldous Huxley has said, “Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.
So, start with
Rekindle your exes,
Embrace them and,
Make new ex-es.
Toastmaster.