Matters of the heart

FOR reasons unknown to the universe, women we have a tendency to bring experiences of our past relationships into our current ones. We carry around the hurt, hate, pain and frustration that quickly mutates to bitterness. We move around, looking like we are victims and someone owes us something. We think just because someone we loved so dearly broke our heart and our trust, then we should carry the weight of all that pain on our shoulders till our dying day.

I apologize if this may sound too harsh but believe me, I speak from experience. I have been there, done that. I know what I am talking about.

As women I feel we have this mentality that just because our old love, Munyaradzi, hurt us in the worst way, then every man automatically becomes another Munya with a different name, looks and dresses differently, that’s all. To us, ‘All men are the same’.

I feel hurt and frustrated by the way we sometimes allow ourselves to be victims in every circumstance that the hand of love deals us. I’m not saying that all guys are good and that the last man you married, or the last boyfriend you had, did not do some serious damage. I’m also not disqualifying the fact that you probably caught him cheating with your best friend. Or worse still, your own sister. I’m not running away from the fact that he didn’t respect you, that he called you names and didn’t appreciate an ounce of what you did or gave to him.

How can I disqualify those very true and painful facts?

What I’m not settling for is the fact that we just become these women ─ so bitter and coarse that we stop living our lives the way we should.

Our little reclusive world

If any of you have read the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, you will know of a certain eccentric Ms Havisham. She was abandoned by her man on their wedding day. For decades, she wore her wedding dress. She sat in the room with her wedding feast ─ including the wedding cake. She became reclusive, did not open the curtains and windows since the day the man left. She let everything rot all around her. All the clocks in the room were stopped at the very moment she got jilted and never moved again. She never left that room.

How many of us have become bitter and angry to the extent that we let our souls become reclusive, shutting ourselves from the entire world? I know so many women like that. I was a woman like that. We ‘freeze time’ and everything else stands still. Our lives come to a standstill.

We refuse to move on because the hurt is too much to bear. We don’t know how to deal with the pain.

But the reality is that none of us can freeze time. It will continue ticking, moving on and it will leave us so far behind. So, women, we need to make the decision to move on with life as quickly as possible. Otherwise we just wallow in self pity and be left behind. We should not forget that we are wonderful creatures with the strength to survive any adversity.

I am so tired of us women throwing these pity parties. We sit in a corner defeated and demanding that the world should stop.

We want everyone to know just how much the Simba or Munya in our lives hurt us. We want the world d to know just how much we will never trust a man because ‘they are all liars and cheaters’. We want the world to know that we would rather be alone than happy.

But come on, being alone is not a good state of existence. Humans are gregarious by nature. Loneliness is not what life designed for you, is it. By living with the pain Simba left, we are just giving Simba, who hurt us, the power to rule our lives and continue hurting us.

Healing is not easy

I know so many women in their lives who have been hurt by men and they just go on day to day, livid with anger and heavy with bitterness. Then they meet Dumisani, a man who is ready to love them just the way they are ─ a man who is ready to give up his life for them. This is the man they pretty much have been waiting for all their life. Sadly to say, they are so caught about in their hurtful past, they don’t get to see what stands in front t of them.

They either run a mile or hide away because they are afraid of commitment. They don’t want to get hurt again. Or if they decide to get involved with Dumie ─ the new guy ─ they bring in all their dirty laundry from the previous relationship with Simba. They start taking it all out on the vulnerable Dumie. They sacrifice their future because of a past relationship that should be over and done with. Most certainly it was not their fault or Dumie’s.

Worse still, some of us are even waiting for that Simba to come to his senses and come back to us. We want to pick up where we left off. We seem to lose our selfworth once our hearts are broken.

Wash your hands ─ move on

Ladies, we need to wash our hands when we are finished and I don’t mean literally in the bathroom sink. I mean your emotional being. Imagine how unhealthy it would be for us to just use the toilet and come out, without washing our hands.

Imagine doing that for a few days, how disgusting and unhealthy it would be to carry around such dirty and filthy hands full of disease and germs. We risk getting cholera, and causing an outbreak.

Now apply that to our emotions. Imagine carrying all the hurt, hate, pain and disappointment from every relationship you have been through, carrying all that around. Our hearts would be full of disease. We need to wash our hands when we are finished with a relationship.

When the men in our lives hurt us so badly, we cry, we get angry, we are sad. We don’t want anything to do with men for a while. Matters of the heart are not that easy to get over, but we must get over them, otherwise they will enslave us and rule our lives. And ladies remember, while we are busy being angry at the man, he is having so much fun with his new hottie.

We need to realize that love will not come to us, in a big box, all wrapped up in red and white paper, with a card with our name on it. Love will not come knocking randomly at our door. Love will keep passing us by if we are still caught up in the past; if we can not clean up for our present and our future. Life is way too short to be carrying around baggage from past relationships. There are good men out there, ready to love us the way we deserve to be loved.

We grieve and then we live.