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A
Dear Wanting To Forget The Past,
I sense throughout your letter how
much you love your girlfriend and still feel hurt by her two one-night
stands. I suppose it feels like a betrayal, especially if your
separation was so short, only two weeks.
First of all, I want to give you
a great deal of credit for your honesty towards each other and
having the courage to work through such a delicate, difficult
and painful issue. The situation can arouse feelings of pain,
jealousy, anger, humiliation etc. One needs sensitivity, maturity,
strength and love to solve this problem, to forgive, forget, and
move on with the relationship. And that is what you are trying
to do, though perhaps not very successfully at the moment. I can
assure you it is very understandable.
What is important about your situation
is that both of you are taking responsibility; your girlfriend
by telling you the truth, and you by recognizing how difficult
this truth is for you and your willingness to prevent the destruction
of your relationship.
Why did your girlfriend break up
with you? How was your relationship before this event? It seems
to me that you didn't really part from each other -- two weeks
of separation in two and a half years of being together is an
extremely short separation. Is separation so scary? You are a
couple that wants a lasting relationship and you love each other.
It seems also that you both feel some kind of insecurity, a fear
of losing each other and being alone. All this contributes to
the continuity of the crisis, which remains unfinished. You write
that she has forgiven your mistakes while you are unable to forget
what happened.
I suggest
that both of you:
- Recognize that what happened
can teach you an important lesson about your relationship and
about yourselves. It is essential to understand the roots of
the problem that brought you to such a crisis.
- Since you are engaged and want
to be "together forever", it would be wise to go for
counseling. It may only be for a short period of time. Counseling
can help to cleanse the bad emotions that have accumulated,
in order to heal the wound. Counseling may also help both of
you to understand and eventually solve the main issues that
are bothering you.
It has been said "time is the
best healer" and I find this a necessary condition, although
not the only one. I believe that this will also work for you.
The more secure and close to your girlfriend you feel, the less
you will be obsessed by the past.
Even if some scars may remain, we
forgive and forget and move on, carrying inside those scars from
the past -- scars which are the expression of our very essence,
reminding us who we are and which battles have been fought and
overcome.
I wish you the best of luck,
Arlette Simon, MSW
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