We Can Love Someone Deeply and Still Outgrow Them
Dear Rising Soul,
There comes a season in our lives when we stand at a crossroads in our relationships and are faced with the question: Is this still working for me? Has the timeline of this relationship run its course?
This experience is very human. And even with that, it is also one of the most challenging experiences.
Be it our marriages, our friendships, or our families, sometimes our souls ask us to sit with our emotions. To evaluate where the relationship stands and what possibilities it still holds.
How do our bodies respond to the energy of the relationship?
Are we retreating inside ourselves, closing off our hearts?
Do we find ourselves starting to dread interaction with that person because we are aware of the disconnection, as it is screaming at us like a neon billboard every time we enter the same room?
Often, out of comfort, fear, uncertainty, guilt, and a desire not to ruffle feathers, we stay in relationships that start bringing more challenges and unhappiness than they do good.
And often it isn’t because the person is bad or wrong, nor are we, but because, as we are meant to do, we evolve, and sometimes that means we outgrow relationships. Remaining in them can slowly create pain for both people involved.
Sometimes we feel guilty for changing. We carry the fear of hurting people if we choose ourselves and what truly makes us happy. We think we are being loyal when the truth is, we are silencing our needs in order to remain because of history, obligation, or hope that things will improve.
Silently, we grieve the person someone once was, or mourn what we hoped the relationship would become.
Sometimes, we become more comfortable with suffering because society paints suffering as normal. Acceptable. But suffering and shrinking ourselves is not what our souls came here to do. That is part of the illusion that keeps us trapped in cycles and patterns that bring more harm than good.
The truth is, our souls are always guiding us because our purpose is to learn and grow, and sometimes that means we reach a point where we have evolved, and with that comes misalignment with others. Sometimes the lessons we were meant to learn within a relationship have simply run their course.
I understand this on a deeply personal level because I have lived through the grief of relationships changing after I chose to speak my truth openly. Some relationships in my life could not survive the breaking of silence around painful dynamics, and that reality brought immense grief with it.
I know what it feels like to mourn people who are still alive. To wrestle with guilt for changing, and to question whether choosing your own healing makes you selfish. But I have also learned that love cannot thrive where truth must constantly be abandoned in order to keep the peace. And sometimes healing asks us to accept that not every soul is meant to walk beside us forever.
We also place enormous pressure on relationships, believing that if they end, then we must have failed. That if we had only tried harder, stayed longer, sacrificed more, or suffered quietly enough, we could somehow force the relationship into what we needed it to become.
That is not love. That is the ego, afraid of change and remaining loyal to a pattern that has long stopped serving us.
We can love someone deeply and still reach the end of what that relationship was meant to be.
And perhaps the most empowering thing we can do — for ourselves and for the other person — is to release our attachment to the outcome. To honor the relationship for all of its seasons. To give it room to expand, or to naturally fade, without forcing, clinging, or betraying ourselves in the process.
Not from a place of numbness, but from a place of acceptance. Understanding that every soul is on its own journey, and sometimes that journey guides us toward new landscapes, new lessons, and new ways of loving ourselves wholly and honestly.
Allow. Honor. Release.
With much love,
Naomi
Recent Comments