My experience with monogamous partnership is that sometimes we can lose our sense of ourselves in the relationship. Often, we begin to compromise who we are, what we desire, and our goals for our life when we take someone else’s desires, dreams, and goals into consideration. While my breakup with my first long-term boyfriend of four years was a heart-breaking experience, I now look back and see that it was a necessary step in discovering who I was without his influence in my life.
Here are three ways my breakup brought me closer to myself:
1. I was able to tap into my feminine strength and ability to stand up for myself.
Sometimes when we’re in a partnership (especially with a masculine person), we can tend to defer to them to make decisions, stand up for us, and overall be our ‘protector’. Once I found myself without that person to lean on as an energetic crutch, I was able to rise up into my own power and strength as a strong female.
2. I learned how to emotionally regulate myself.
Since there was no one else to be there for me in intimate moments of crisis, I learned what I needed to manage my emotions. I turned to breathwork and sat in silence. I took myself on nature walks and began to paint more often. In those moments when at one time I felt bored, lonely, or unwell because I didn’t have someone by me, I was able to fill myself back up and tend to my heart.
3. I had time and space to learn what my body loved and didn’t love in sex.
When in a partnership it’s easy to fall into sexual patterns where we are more concerned with our partner’s pleasure than our own. Having time and space to explore my own body without someone else to think of made my understanding of what turned me on, what type of touch my body responds best to, and what type of stimulation my body loved the most so much more easier.
Finding ourselves single can become an amazing opportunity to embrace our ability to tend to ourselves in ways we didn’t know how before. Our feminine strength has room to grow when we’re not influenced by another person, and this power then radiates to the rest of our lives. For me, my breakup was a blessing in disguise as I now know who I am on a much deeper level than ever before.
