Maybe It Didn’t Fail

I’ve been thinking about the word failed.

Especially when we use it to describe relationships.

If two people stay together for fifty years, we call the relationship successful.

If they love each other for ten years and then decide they shouldn’t be together anymore, somehow the whole thing gets stamped:

FAILED.

Really?

Ten years of conversations and trips and inside jokes and Tuesday nights and Christmas mornings and learning and growing, all erased because the relationship eventually changed?

That seems like a pretty unforgiving grading system.

Of course, some relationships end badly.

Some absolutely need to end.

But sometimes there isn’t a villain.

Sometimes two people simply change.

What they wanted at one point in their lives isn’t what they want anymore.

And I wonder if part of what makes that so painful is the belief that an ending changes the meaning of everything that came before it.

We don’t apply that logic to most other things.

A wonderful vacation wasn’t a failure because we came home.

A friendship from college wasn’t meaningless because our lives eventually went in different directions.

A chapter of a book doesn’t become pointless because you turned the page.

So why do we do it with love?

Maybe a relationship can be meaningful and still end.

Maybe someone can be exactly right for one part of your life without being right for every part of it.

Maybe love can change us, teach us, crack us open, make us laugh until we can’t breathe and still not last forever.

An ending gets to be sad.

But perhaps it doesn’t get to rewrite the whole story.

If You’re Curious…

• Have you ever decided a relationship failed simply because it ended?

• What did a past relationship give you that is still part of who you are today?

• How might your story change if you stopped using “forever” as the only measure of successful love?