Each heartbreak is actually the fulfillment of a promise love has made to us all, that when we turn to love we will be healed. And the act of falling in love opens us to our full potential for joy. Letting go of our habitual protective behaviors is a vital part of this process.

“ When we are courageous enough to truly love someone, we are inviting into our lives a higher power than our protections and defenses, and our love will be more than we bargained for -- both more terrible and more wonderful. Love will demand that we work on every single thing that gets in the way of our capacity for love and takes us deeper into love, each step designed to meet exactly what we need and to challenge us to the maximum we can handle. After all, love only has the time we are alive to teach us how to love. Every way we have developed of holding back from the truth and reality of our relationships will be challenged repeatedly by love in intimate sexual partnerships. True marriage is not the ceremony in the church but a commitment to go on this journey together, where there is nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide from love.”

“The value of taking stock when a relationship ends is that it teaches you a lot about who you are and what your developmental task has been,” says Daphne Rose Kingma in ’Coming Apart.’ “If you pause to evaluate your old relationship, you can create your next relationship out of a much more highly developed self-consciousness. You can choose someone who is a more appropriate partner for you, both in terms of your emotional preferences in your life and values, and your growing edge as a person.”

Kingma goes on to say there comes a time when we have accomplished our essential developmental tasks. “Eventually, we all get to the place where -- except for fine-tunings and refinements -- we have learned pretty much who we are. We’ve sorted out our preferences from the vast number of possibilities we all have as human beings, and we know what we want to spend our lives doing. Generally, there is a fail-safe point at which we have pretty much constructed our identities and where we are ready to live the rest of our lives out of the amalgam of those identities. This is the point at which we can make a relationship that lasts a lifetime.”