[Agape] Loving Your Exes

*Author’s note: The reality is that we all have gone through the pain of people exiting our lives. But, there is growth and healing in loving those who are no longer in our lives. So, whether it is an ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, or even an ex-friend, we can all relate to one another and, together, we can learn to grow from what these people have taught us. If you turn on the radio, you can almost instantaneously hear a song about a bad breakup, or one avenging a bad breakup. In these melodious accounts, we are told to move on, key their cars, slash their tires, find someone new, lose weight, make them jealous, get a new dog, move out of the country, et cetera. Success and happiness is the best revenge, right? But, what comes after revenge? What happens after we have made them jealous? What do we do after we have proven to them that we can do better? Do we really find contentment and wholeness in proving something to our exes? What if we are missing something?If there is a way to love our exes, it should not be by instigating revenge or trying to make them jealous. If we do so, our pursuits in moving on may end up leading us to feel lonelier and more unfulfilled than before. So, how do you love someone who has hurt you? How do you love someone who is no longer in your life?Loving your exes becomes more feasible when you learn to love them for the role they played in your life. We must become comfortable with accepting the fact that not everyone will stay in our lives for the entirety of our lives. Most people may not even stay for a vast majority of our lives. People will come and go throughout the course of our lives. Some will go graciously and others will go leaving a significant hole that you do not know when or how it will ever be filled again. In these instances, you must learn to love those who have left you, those who are no longer a part of your life. You should love them because regardless of the mark they left on your life, they still left a mark. They had a purpose in your life; they taught you, shaped you, and influenced you whether it was through encouragement or through pain. Through someone’s encouragement, you may be reinforced in who you are and you may be inspired to reach your fullest potential. Even still, through someone’s infliction of pain, you may learn of your strength and of your ability to overcome hurt, doubt, and uncertainty. We must learn to be okay with people leaving. We must learn to love however short or long their time was in the course of our lives, because every person has an impact on our lives and every person plays a part in enlightening us of our character and of the power within us.After accepting and admiring the role our exes have played in our lives, we must learn to forgive them through our actions, rather than merely through our words. The reality is that we may not ever get a chance to practice forgiveness through speaking to our exes, through having closure with our exes. So, we must learn the power of forgiveness that comes from within us and shows itself through our actions. Even so, loving our exes may entail forgiving them when we think they do not deserve it. This love, then, calls us to get out of our own heads, to sift through our emotions, and to push pas our own expectations of fairness. All of us have set our own parameters for what we think is fair, what we believe is right, and what we have come to know we deserve. We have set standards that we will not compromise on; we have set expectations for others which we feel entitled to. But, sometimes our judgment of fairness and rightness can inhibit our ability to love others entirely and selflessly. When we are called to love and forgive those who have hurt us, we push past those parameters and expectations and we allow ourselves to grow beyond the limits we have set for ourselves. When we love our exes by forgiving them, we experience a love that is centered, not on the betterment of ourselves, but the betterment of others.But, in loving our exes, we, ourselves, experience a love that binds bitterness and sets us free. Through humbly and selflessly forgiving our exes for the pain they may have caused us, and for accepting the impact they have made on our lives, we experience freedom. When we exert this love, we experience wholeness and healing that we could not have made complete through any means of our own. This freedom is unleashed in us when we begin to transform the way we think of our exes. When we constantly think negatively of our exes, our minds become crammed and our hearts become heavy. But, when we make a simple yet conscious effort to think positively and encouragingly of our exes, we clear our minds and allow this selfless and freeing love to break through the constraints we, ourselves, have put on our hearts. When we shed our negative thoughts of our exes, when we replace bitterness and resentment with gratitude, we create space for freedom to reign in our hearts and in our minds. Then, once this freedom beings to work in our hearts, we will notice a transformation in our actions. In the act of loving our exes, the same love that we show to them begins to break the bonds of bitterness and resentment so that our own lives are changed. It is this radical love that begins to dictate our actions. We see, then, that the radical way in which we love those who have hurt us and left us begins to radically transform our lives.So, start simply, but start with a determination to see this radical love come to fruition. Allow your heart to go through the pain and confusion of loving someone who has hurt you, because once you push through the confusion and the sing, your heart will experience a pure and enticing freedom that it may not have known before. Once you experience the freedom and the humility in loving your exes, you will allow yourself to leap to bounds that may have been unknown to you before so that your heart and mind can exceed your own expectations in order to further reach those around you.