When a relationship ends, you begin to think of all the negative things about that person. Sometimes that’s a coping mechanism that helps you deal with the loss, and sometimes it’s clarity. You must step away from something to truly see it. If you’re glued to the side of something, you really have no idea what the other side of it looks like. But if you manage to rip yourself apart from it, you might lose skin, but the new one you grow will be thicker and more resilient– more capable of suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Or the loss of a friend.

And is it really a loss, if your newfound clarity tells you about your myopia? Isn’t it more a gain, that you learned from it, that you experienced it fully, and perhaps with the blissful ignorance that sometimes goes hand in hand with loving someone?

In the end, the best we can hope for is that we bring something away from that relationship which serves us in some beneficial way later on. The smart ones among us will never allow ourselves to make the same mistakes and expect different results.