During covid I unexpectedly entered into a relationship that we both knew had a natural end date. I’ve been thinking a lot about something my tea teacher, Mariana Rittenhouse, said during one of our ceremonies: that to love is to grieve. The two are inextricable.
Growing up we are more often than not fed two dimensional portrayals of romantic relationships that do not prepare us well for the complexity and messiness of real life. They do not do justice to the many layered forms of love, nor how grief can be a humbling reminder of our humanity. People walk into our lives when we need them to, and though we may grow to love them dearly, we recognize that sometimes it was not meant to be forever.
The days are becoming lighter now, and as the darkness of a long and difficult winter melts into Spring, the visceral reminder of the inevitability of change all around brings equal measure of relief and loss. Moving forward means accepting (no matter how reluctantly) the reality that some people and experiences exist in a vacuum and cannot be extracted from one another. But we can also draw comfort from the fact that the empty space in our lives will be filled with new people, new experiences. It will look different, but we can honor those difficult goodbyes while knowing that there will always be more out there waiting for us.