The Weight of Every ‘Forever’ We Ever Promised

There is a specific kind of grief in looking at the person you love and realizing they are a beautiful destination you were never meant to stay in, yet your hands are so full of the years you’ve invested that you don't know how to let them go.

You look at them and see safety, history, and profound tenderness. The love you share is real—a deep, rooted, undeniable thing forged by years of shared living. They are a beloved fixture, a warm place in a turbulent world. And yet, deep beneath the years of shared memories, a powerful truth resides: The love is real, but the word forever feels like a misalignment. The feeling gnaws at you, as you push it down deep, denying its existence. “Maybe if I deny it long enough the feeling will go away.” But in reality, you begin to see all the reasons why what you’re feeling is the truth. Your truth. 

You’re not a bad person, and you are not by any means cruel. You are simply experiencing one of the great, misunderstood realities of adult love:

It is absolutely possible to love someone deeply, fiercely, and with genuine affection, while simultaneously knowing, with total clarity, that they are not the person you are meant to build your life with.

It is okay to feel this way. It is a sign of the growing strength of your self-knowledge.

The tragedy isn't that the love isn't enough; the tragedy is realizing that love is not always synonymous with alignment.

You guard that secret from everyone including yourself, because once you speak that truth out loud, it becomes real. 

As long as the feeling remains a silent, buried thought, you can maintain the illusion of the life you should have. 

You can use denial as a temporary anesthetic but the moment you articulate it—the moment you allow that terrifying sentence to leave your lips—you make the break real, immediate, and irreversible. You confirm the demolition.

This silence is your attempt to protect them from pain, but primarily, it is your desperate attempt to protect yourself from the guilt, the consequence, and the overwhelming reality of the unknown future. You fear the terrifying vastness of having to begin again, alone, stripped of the comfort you have known. 

And yes, starting over IS hard. It’s a completely new beginning of self. You’ve dated someone for so long, you almost forget who you are without them. Everything becomes you and them. Who am I anymore? Who would I be? What will my life look like? What will people think of me? Will I ever find anyone else? Will I regret it? What if I can’t find better, someone I’m more aligned with? What if I hurt them? I never meant to cause them pain. 

What many people don’t realize, with all the pain you feel from a break up—and yes the pain is very real—you also feel relief. You aren’t lying anymore, to them and to yourself. 

It’s at this point, you can start discovering who you are again. After so many years, we all change, grow and become different people. Now you can begin to be in total relationship with yourself. Honing in on who you really are, what you most align with, who you most align with, and what feels right for you. 

The reality is that you don’t know what the future holds and the unknown is one of the scariest things. But the more you align with who you truly are and whats truly meant for you, the more the universe will send you things and people who are meant to be a part of your life. You have to trust this, trust God, because he wouldn’t allow you to feel misaligned to begin with if that person was truly meant for you. 

Understand that every day you delay is not a gift of love to them, but an accumulation of compounded debt for both of you. You are stealing their time—the time they need to heal and find a partner who will choose them with full, unreserved commitment. You are also stealing your own energy, pouring it into a relationship that drains your core purpose. The regret of leaving is temporary; the regret of remaining is the permanent ache of an unlived life.

The most compassionate act you can perform is the act of clarity.

When the time comes to speak the truth, ground your words in your own journey, not their flaws. It isn’t always about them, simply just about you feeling misaligned. Like something feels off, but you can’t put your finger on it. 

This was me, years ago. I’ll never forget the feeling I had, in the pit of my gut, that the person I was with wasn’t my forever, they were only there to teach me something. This feeling came on a regular day, driving to the supermarket, and nothing bad even happened, no arguments, no disagreements, just a knowing in my gut. Immediately I freaked out inside, denying what I suddenly felt. How could that be? I loved him deeply. Why would I feel that way? We were inseparable, the feelings must be wrong! 

Well I never listened, I allowed more years to go by. The feelings got stronger. And still I kept denying it. I had no idea how to start over. And with who? What was even my “type” anymore? How do I even date again, it’s been so long? 

The path forward will hurt. It will require strength and courage you didn’t know you had. But when you finally choose your own life, you will trade the agonizing, internal civil war for the profound, deep peace of congruency.

That peace is waiting for you. It requires you to be brave enough to admit the truth that you already know.