When a relationship ends, it isn’t the person we mourn. It’s the death of the dream we miss.

The person with whom we think we are in love, brought us the dream. They created a template from which we saw our future and craved what we saw. Perhaps they promised a life we desired.

Perhaps we saw a vision of what we wanted to create, and they were the pivotal piece in that scenario. Beyond our love of the person, the greater love that attends all relationships is the dream that partnership created.

It is the loss of the dream we shared that causes our pain upon the termination of a love affair. We saw the possibility of merging our dream with this “other,” as they fueled that possibility with their presence. It is the dream of what will never be that haunts us in the late hours of the night.

Our lover’s body, smell and touch is the physical representation of that desire. It is the dream we crave to embrace in our sorrow. In the lonely moments of sadness and disillusionment… we are sure we will never taste such exquisite beauty again.

They were The One. The only one, who could lead us to this vision. Without them, we are lost and alone. In those thoughts, we believe our dream is dead. In losing our partner, they walked off with our life.

The supreme twist on this story is that it isn’t the person who has broken our heart. Our heart is broken by believing our dream has ended. The dream is what we really want, and the person was only our access to it.

Whether that dream was one of family, connection, security, adventure or discovery; we now believe it is lost in their leaving. The person is only the touch-point of its manifestation. They came to activate what we wanted, or show us what we didn’t know we wanted until they arrived. We hold the ideal of partnership in a specific format that instructs us that its loss is our true pain.

I see it differently. The person is of small effect. Their importance lies in the fact that we have loved them. They allowed us to experience the sublime out-flow of our love. In that sense, they are huge.

But in the smaller moments between activity and silence, it appears that they are the gift we seek. Their loss is interpreted as all loss. Our dreams are continually growing.

Each partner brings their own components to the mix. With each new involvement our dream expands, as they add to the content of the ultimate image we desire.

Our dream is in constant amendment and expansion. It is the gift retained, long after the relationship has ended.

If we can begin to view the coming and going of lovers in this manner, the sting and torment will subside. We can focus on our new dream; enlarged not by what we miss but what we are gaining.

There will be love again. There will be the one who holds us by their side and ignites a new vision of the future. Each and every situation is here to deliver us the bounty we desire, and here to release our smaller version of what we wanted in the knowledge that more that is possible. It is a continuum of ever-expanding upward desire.

Each dream becomes more detailed in depth and dimension. It is imperative that we embrace the new vision, in order to release the pain of the past. The desire to grow beyond where we have been, is the tool to liberate the suffering of what was lost.