by Jessica Kuzmier

Created on: November 30, 2010   Last Updated: June 02, 2011

If the past can teach you anything, there is no better lesson plan than to search through the wreckage of your romantic past.  

It seems fashionable nowadays to assume everything in your life is a mommy or a daddy issue. However, no one chooses his or her parents.  Romantic partners, with few exceptions in the Western world, are choices based on your individual decision making process.  Not only that, they are choices generally made, at the absolute earliest, somewhere around adolescence.  This means that it is a fairly calculated decision using some level of reason, not pure infantile instinct.  Therefore, when a person chooses a romantic partner of any level, there usually is some imprint that is left when that person is no longer there, for whatever reason.  

The depth of the memory depends on how much the relationship affected you.  It probably has nothing to do with how long you were with a person, either.  Maybe the first girl you had a crush on haunts you more than thinking about your former wife of twenty years.  Why this strange murkiness and unevenness exists is hard to explain, but some people just leave longer shadows than other when they are gone.  It does no use to try to convince yourself intellectually that it is in the past or that the relationship doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t work out.  If someone in your romantic past, whether forty years ago or forty days ago, is haunting you, perhaps you can use this “shadow” as a lesson plan for a better life today.  If there are wounds, the relationship meant something, no matter how much you try to write it off as nothing.  

The best way to come to terms with past relationships is to meet them head on.  Burying things alive in a ruse to get on with your life will probably just increase the wreckage for your new partner, if and when he or she arrives.   This does not necessarily mean go contact your ex and hash it out.  It doesn’t even mean to contact him or her at all.  There are certainly cases when this even would be inadvisable or dangerous.  But running away from feelings does nothing to help your life today.  Dealing with feelings head on is not some woo-woo New Agey thing where you balance your chakras and learn to see auras.  You don’t have to contact an astrologer to see why Cancer doesn’t do well with Aries or whatever your situation is in

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