Trusting Again

By Marlon leTerrance

"I will not let another man hurt me. No matter what happens in my life, I won’t allow another man to get this close to me again." These sentiments can sometimes sneak up behind you with the subtlety of a Mack truck. Everything you have worked to create in your relationship has been snatched away from you. You feel confused and overwhelmed. An assortment of emotions swims inside of you like a school of malicious fish, each emotion vying for your attention.

Usually, anger is the first to steal the limelight. A voice screams out for you to break something, to smash something, or, even more satisfying, to finally tell that worthless tramp who calls herself your friend that she doesn’t have to hide her flirtatious stares at your man anymore because you've dumped him and you won’t be taking him back. The voice mischievously suggests outrageous ideas that might make you feel better. Scratch his car with your keys. Make sure he feels the hurt that you feel. The laptop computer he accidentally left at your apartment? Lose it.

Your anger may fluctuate back and forth, but it is not long before pain claims center stage. An agonizing sense of emptiness buries itself deep inside the pit of your stomach and refuses to leave. You trusted someone, you loved someone, and now he’s gone. But the memories of him remain suspended in the air like the blade of a guillotine. Everything you do seem to remind you of him. You know you made the right choice, but it hurts too much to care about that. You are alone. And it hurts.

Many women talk about the embarrassing disappointment they often feel after a love is lost. They speak of the shame and the humiliation that sometimes comes along with a romantic break-up.

“Everyone knew that Robert was my boyfriend,” declared Tammy over a phone conversation. “We’d been together almost three years. We went everywhere together; we did everything side-by-side. After Robert and I split up, people would see me alone and inquire about him. In the beginning, I couldn’t control the hurt that would flash across my face. I thought it would be easy to move on, but no one would let me. I would hear well-wishers declare, “That’s such a shame. You two were so good together. Why did you let such a good man go?” It made me doubt my decision. It made me shy away from telling people that Robert and I were no longer together. I was ashamed of being single again.”

It doesn’t take long after a romantic break-up for you to be accosted by a host of emotions you hadn’t experienced in ages—frustration, loneliness, and depression. These emotions crowd around you in a solemn silence, as if to pay their respect to the death of your relationship.

The problem with ending emotional relationships is the trust factor. The man you are about to sever ties with is the very same man who has shared many intimate years of your life. You know each other intimately; you’ve shared personal secrets with one another that only the two of you know. You’ve exposed him to the inner you, both the good and the bad—you’ve given him the key to a part of you that no one else is allowed to share. And now that person is gone.

Far too many people can remember, with amazing clarity, the moment their love was either lost or betrayed. They can remember the disbelief, the anger. They can remember the self-doubt and confusion. But more than anything else, they seem to always remember the moment they vowed to never love again.

Tammy didn’t want to lose Robert. She loved him completely. She had trusted him, and over the course of their relationship, she had watched that trust get tangled in a barbed-wire fence of dishonesty. Tammy was determined to never make the same mistake again. She promised to safeguard her heart next time, to never allow herself to trust a man so easily. “I was never a jealous woman before Robert. I mean, if he said he was going out with friends somewhere, I never questioned him. I never doubted his faithfulness. The first couple times a female called our home, I never doubted him when he claimed they were business calls. But now, things are different. Now, I find myself doubting everything a man says. Robert destroyed the innocence in me, and I somehow knew I‘d never get it back. And I hated him for that.”

The situation becomes even worse when you have to ignore the snobby glances of female associates who once envied your happiness. They offer you the usual condolences, but beneath the surface of their eyes, you can almost see them gloating. You had managed to be happy in a world that seemed miserable to them, and now they were elated to have you join them in despair.

After you have been hurt by love and relationships, it’s not easy to muster the courage to start dating again. You often find yourself going out of your way to avoid men, for you have learned how emotionally painful relationships can be. You don’t go on dates. You ignore the advances of seemingly genuine suitors. Men are dogs, and you refuse to operate an emotional doghouse anymore.

What happens when it hurts too much to love again? What do you do when your trust and faith in men have been crushed so often you don’t know how to trust anymore? And even more depressing is the question no one seems willing to answer for you: How do you find Mr. Right when you honestly don’t believe in him anymore?

The fifth step to finding Mr. Right is certainly one of the most difficult steps. I will ask you to learn to trust again. I will search out the most convincing way to explain to you the benefit of allowing yourself to love again. I will argue, hopefully successfully, that even though you shut out pain and disappointment and hurt when you lock away your heart and become an emotional zombie, you also shut out happiness, joy, and the experience of love.

It’s human nature to protect ourselves from pain. It’s human nature to draw up an elaborate emotional defense system to protect ourselves from the carelessness of others. But sometimes, experiencing pain and disappointment is the price we pay for being human, for being vulnerable. Unlike machines, we are not able to tinker through this world, performing important tasks and doing what is needed without exposing ourselves to hurt and possible rejection. Machines are able to deal with human beings without suffering emotionally precisely because they are not human, precisely because they lack the ability to feel. When you trade in your car for a newer, more expensive brand automobile, your old car doesn’t turn on its headlights and wail out accusations of betrayal. It’s unable to remind you of all the times it took you to places you couldn’t have otherwise went. Only humans have this ability. Only humans can experience the pain of a broken heart.

I think it’s important that you understand that you are not alone. The mythical Cupid isn’t sitting on some cloud-like recliner and purposely torturing your heart. There is nothing wrong with you as a woman. Truth is, human beings have been struggling with the idea of love since the beginning of time. And to be honest, we are still no closer now than we were when we crawled around in caves and expressed our desire with animal grunts and wrestling matches.

When you protect yourself against the danger of heartache by refusing to open up again, I am afraid that you do yourself and your heart a disservice. When you try to shield yourself from pain by avoiding almost every man who expresses an interest in you, I am concerned that you lose something valuable in the process. According to Harold Kushner, the author of the best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, the loss of a loved one “is supposed to hurt. In the same way that dead cells, our hair and fingernails, feel no pain when they are cut but living cells bleed and hurt, so I believe that spiritually dead souls can be cut into, separated from other souls, and not feel pain. But living, sensitive souls are easily hurt.”

I don’t like being hurt. I don’t like experiencing pain. But I believe that we pay a horrible price when we shut ourselves away from the world of love and relationships. We have all experienced the bitterness of people who seems to hate the life they have been blessed with, people who are always complaining about something unimportant. These people are often lonely, miserable folks who drive people away from them with their ways. Often, this happens in a relationship. You can become so bitter, so cold, and so miserable from the experience of a relationship that turned sour that you sabotage your romantic possibilities before they begin.

You are not a machine. You can’t go through life without experiencing heartache. Love is not a guarantee. Relationships are risky. The process of trusting another human being with your feelings is a gamble. Sometimes you will win; sometimes you will lose. But I believe it hurts so much when we lose a loved one precisely because the process of love is so special. If love didn’t have such immense value, it wouldn’t matter to us when our relationship failed. And we feel the pain of this failure because we are human, because our hearts are vulnerable. Take away that vulnerability and you have a safe, machine like world that shuts out love and happiness as effectively as it does pain and disappointment.

It will take courage on your part to unlock the gates that imprisons your heart. Even in your despair, you know you can’t convict love and relationships for the emotional crimes your ex-boyfriend committed. Love is not some monstrous beast just waiting to rip you apart the moment you develop feeling for someone. You have been hurt, possibly even betrayed, but it wasn’t love’s fault. Love and trust are not the bad guys.

It will take time for you to forgive the men in your past who have destroyed your faith in relationships. But your soul mate can only enter into your life when you let him. It will be risky. It will be filled with uncertainties. Still, it’s worth it.