Like Riding a Bike

When I look at my friends and I look at myself, I can see how we’ve changed. We’ve all been through tough times in relationships and the wear and tear eventually takes a toll on the person we are today. I don’t only mean just the girls either. Sure, men have broken our hearts, upset us, but I know women can be just as hurtful to men. I suppose what I’m wondering is, when we are hurt, badly, how do we bounce back? How do we trust again?

When you take a rubber band, for example, and you stretch it and keep stretching it, eventually it begins to lose shape, and sometimes it turns brittle and breaks. At the start it is able to bounce back right away but eventually it starts to lose elasticity. I believe any given person is this way. We try and try but each time we get hurt something changes inside of us. From what I’ve seen this turns many of us into cynics and we forget how to trust someone.

The harshest example of heartbreak I would say is finding someone we love cheating on us. There are thousands of cases that I could point out in this area but the story is generally the same. So they didn’t love us back as much as we loved them and they were too cowardly to tell us to our face. Now what? We are angry and hurt and in most we lose trust in the opposite sex. It doesn’t have to be cheating that makes us lose trust, there are many reasons. The problem is we carry on these trust issues with us into the next relationship and the next relationship as almost a form of self-sabotage. We dwell and we nit-pick on the little details and eventually we lose that positive, bubbly, outlook we used to have on relationships.

How do we begin to learn to trust again? Not every girl or every guy out there is out to hurt us, but why don’t we give people the benefit of the doubt? Why are we so scared to be open and vulnerable? So we will get hurt, it happens. We need to start looking at the bigger picture. They hurt us and yes it’s a hard thing to have to go through but stop for just a minute and think, would you have wanted to spend the rest of your life with someone who wasn’t going to treat you right? I am hoping your answer was no. So they why waste even more than a second dwelling on them and punishing the future men and women in our lives over something that someone who wasn’t worth it did? In the future we will meet that one person who will be “the one” but how will we ever know if we don’t trust them enough for them to be “the one”?

Sometimes we need to take the guard down and allow ourselves to be in a position where we might meet the man or woman of our dreams. Maybe we get hurt again, maybe we don’t, but if we don’t try then we just let them go because we don’t open ourselves up to the possibility of them. When we were little we fell off our bikes so many times before we could finally ride around the block. Maybe we need to unlock that very spirit that we once had, the persistence to just keep trying until we got it right. Life was much simpler then, we trusted unconditionally. Now we say life is hard and it’s too hard to trust anyone, maybe if we just applied what we used to know to what we know now trusting someone would come a whole lot easier to us. Maybe we need to be careful, but where do we draw the line between being careful and becoming cynical? Let’s open up a little and just see what happens, you never know unless you try, right?