How
many times can you end up in the exact same place, before you start to question
your sense of direction?
A woman walks into a bar and is barely situated in her seat before
an attractive man comes over offering to buy her a drink. She agrees, he takes the seat beside her and
for hours they drink while becoming better acquainted. Fast forward to the end of the night – he takes
her home, where she invites him in. One
thing leads to another and no one puts on the brakes, but that’s okay, because
he calls her the next day and they date calmly for months until he starts
frequenting bars again and she catches him cheating.
They break up. She takes a few weeks to get over him before she
decides that it’s time to start over and
get back out there. She dusts off a few pieces from that section of her closet
that she left tucked away during their relationship, calls a few girlfriends,
and heads for the bar.
She meets a new guy and the evening goes much the same way, except this time,
she doesn’t have sex with him the first night. A few weeks go by, all elements of the
relationship are in full swing, when she catches him at the bar with another
woman.
They break up. She mourns for a few weeks. She returns to the bar scene and meets a new guy. They’re together for about a year. Things are
going well, until he goes to a bachelor party, after which, he falls back into
hanging out with the guys. She feels the
energy between them is starting to shift.
She’s convinced that he’s cheating, even though she has no proof and his
time away from home seems “appropriately accounted for”. Unable to shake the
feeling that something is wrong, she breaks up with him. She takes a few weeks to mourn. Then, one day, about six months later, while scrolling through his social media, she learns that he’s seeing someone
new. She rationalizes that they must’ve started dating while the two of them
were still together. Determined to “win
the breakup”, she dusts off that back section of her closet once more and heads back to
the bar. It’s
time to start over.
Enter woman #2, we’ll call her Melinda. Melinda starts out as a brown-haired,
160-pound high school volleyball player who falls for the early twenties
college-enrolled uncle of the kids that she babysits. They become secretly involved. She
gets pregnant. They marry and have a couple of kids before she catches him
cheating with a 120-pound blonde college freshman.
They divorce. She goes into mourning. Months later, tired of the
depression, she decides to ‘fight for her family’. Surely, they
can start over! She loses 50 lbs.,
bleaches her hair and goes to get her husband back. Unfortunately, he’s now engaged to the new
girl. To get back at her now 30-something white ex-husband, she takes her hot
new body to a college campus and finds her own college freshman – a black one,
who has no more in common with her ex than testicles and chin hair.
Because of the age difference, they date
secretly for months before
she finds out that he has a girlfriend on campus. When she confronts him with
her knowledge, he confesses that she’s cool and all, but he “likes his women
thick”. To lure him away from his young lover, she gains 30 lbs. When that
doesn’t work, she breaks up with him and finds a new man unlike him or her
philandering ex-husband. Because the new
guy is “going through a divorce”, they too date in secret for months, until she sees him in Whole
Foods with his wife and child.
So,
what do these two women have in common?
They
are both more interested in acting out their broken cycles,
than
they are in actually fixing them.
Now, anyone who knows me, knows that January 1st –
February 14th annoys me more than any other time of year. It’s the
season when gyms are overcrowded, I can never get a good machine, and all of my
social media is flooded with the stamp #NewYearNewMe. It’s the season when people recite the lie… (**clears
throat**) make the resolution 😊 to
finally eat right, lose weight, get in shape, and “settle down”
#RelationshipGoals.
They make vision boards with
cool photos and catchy affirmations to inspire them, until 5 lbs. and 6 weeks
later, Valentine’s Day either finds them alone on the couch or out with their
single friends, and they decide that it’s just not worth it. I tried…I’ll start over next year, because at the end
of the day, the only thing consistent about their behaviors is their
imprisonment in the cycle of brokenness.
We’ve all heard it said that the definition of insanity is doing
the exact same thing over and over, expecting a different result, so why do we
do it with our relationships under the guise of “starting over”, expecting the
next one, to be “The One”?
Please, don’t misunderstand me. There's nothing wrong with
starting over; nothing wrong with change; and progress is always welcomed, but how
do you fix something that you won’t even acknowledge is broken?
You bounce from relationship to relationship with the exact same
man under a different name, in a different body, because you won’t acknowledge
the common denominator – you. Your problem isn’t the people you’re
meeting. It may not even be the places
you meet them. Your problem
is your patterns. As humans,
we live out cycles. There’s no preventing it, life, by its very essence
dictates that for every mountain, there must be a valley. For every harvest, seeds must be sown. The
issue is that instead of walking this rugged terrain of life in wholeness,
having acknowledged all the pieces of us that are broken, we cycle through the
same scenario of brokenness like hamsters on a wheel.
So, do us all a favor, before you dust off that dress in the back
of your closet and head to the bar; before you change to fit what you think men want; or encounter
Earl, who is really just Tim, David and Derrick, in a different body; ask
yourself this –
If
you wouldn’t run a race with a broken foot,
why
do you run from relationship to relationship with a broken heart?
Follow Me as I Follow God
@RevealingRuth
