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Maybe your divorce is actually an asset.
By Orna & Matthew Walters — Written on May 21, 2022
After you've gone through a divorce, it’s easy to envy the young people who haven’t experienced much heartbreak. Maybe you believe it would be easier to meet your soulmate with fewer heartbreaks and disappointments.
The truth is, the experience you bring to dating after you've been through a divorce can help you meet your soulmate and achieve lasting love.
Hopefully, you learned from your marriage and divorce and are ready to do things differently when it comes to love. You’re no longer naïve about life and love and you can choose more wisely and be more discerning through the dating process — even when it's scary or intimidating to imagine dating again.
The secret to meeting your soulmate after divorce is in using the end of your marriage as a powerful tool for learning and discovery.
Just because you didn’t get it right the first time doesn’t mean that you can’t get love right the next time.
Here are 8 reasons why dating after divorce helps you meet your soulmate.
1. Your expectations are realistic.
No one gets married thinking it won’t last. Your hope for what could be turned out not to be. You’ve come out the other side and experienced failed love. That can be a great motivator to do things differently this time.
When you’ve been married before, you’ve released the fantasy that love will just magically work out without any effort. You’ve figured out that your partner doesn’t come with mind-reading powers — and meeting your soulmate won’t change that.
This is a golden opportunity to use the lessons you learned to help you select an ideal partner — a soulmate. Your soulmate is the person who gets you, chooses you, and is willing to go through life’s challenges with you because you both know that you’re better together than apart.
Realistic expectations are the gateway to showing up as your authentic self. Now that you're no longer holding onto a fantasy of love you’re in an ideal situation to approach love and dating differently this time.
It’s a great opportunity to upgrade your dating strategies.
2. You get a fresh start.
Going through a divorce is difficult but now that you’re ready to date again, you have a fresh start. This means that you don’t have to put up with any crap.
You get to make the rules for how you want to approach love and no one else gets to dictate to you what's important to you. You can start dating with purpose and this will serve you on the path to meeting your soulmate.
When you let your freak flag fly your soulmate can find you.
Love requires risk and when you’re on the other side of a divorce and looking for lasting love, you can more easily risk and share your dreams and desires upfront.
Those who aren’t interested in the real, authentic you will scamper off, leaving only those who are truly interested in a relationship with you.
3. You're more resilient.
Overcoming difficulties helps you grow stronger. Resistance creates resilience. The fact that you’re interested in meeting your soulmate after divorce means you have cultivated resilience in your heart.
Emotional strength and resilience come from facing difficult experiences and overcoming them. By facing the difficult issues in your life, you have developed courage and strength.
Life will always have challenges and divorce is one of the greatest relationship challenges you will go through. The internal strength you've cultivated will give you the endurance to keep on keeping on.
Meeting your soulmate after your divorce comes from developing the resilience you need to keep hope alive and to continue to date and move toward greater contentment.
4. You’re clear on what you don't want.
Most people aren’t motivated to create more joy in their lives. Instead, they’re motivated to avoid emotional pain. Post-divorce, you can use this to your advantage to meet your soulmate.
Through your divorce, you’ve become crystal clear on the type of relationship you don't want. Use this clarity to quickly move on when it’s apparent someone is not an ideal match for you.
Instead of wasting time to see if someone will change and become the person you want, you’ve learned that people show you who they really are. This makes it easy for you to spot someone who's not a match.
5. You can take responsibility for your part.
A healthy marriage requires mutual participation. The hard part is not getting stuck in either blame or guilt.
Pointing the finger of blame or taking too much responsibility will only keep you stuck in the past and lingering on what was.
You're not 100 percent responsible for your marriage ending. However, you're 100 percent responsible for your half.
Read that again, because most of our clients take too much responsibility upon themselves. Doing that will never allow you to create the lasting love you desire.
Draw a clear boundary to know what's your responsibility and what's not. Keep your side of the street clean by owning your behavior. Stay on your side of the street by not blaming yourself for your ex’s behavior.
This way, you can focus on what you did or didn’t do to make the marriage work and have a strategy for doing things differently next time.
6. You’re ready to upgrade your dating skills.
Dating hasn’t changed much over time, but the tools used to meet people are constantly evolving. It can feel intimidating and a bit overwhelming to sort through the newest technological options.
Online dating, dating apps, and other technologies are just tools for meeting people.
You can try to avoid the apps and hope that you coincidentally bump into to love of your life at Starbucks. Or you can invest a little bit of time to educate yourself on using these new tools properly.
Also, the dating strategies you used to meet your ex aren’t going to work if you want to meet your soulmate.
There’s no point in dating like a teenager.
Rather than expecting that you'll meet your soulmate by accident, plan to upgrade your dating strategies even before you go out on one date.
Then, through a systematic and sensible dating process, you can discover new things about yourself and practice new communication skills. Just like learning anything new — this all takes practice, practice, practice. The dating arena gives you plenty of opportunities.
7. You can create a new vision for love.
You know you don’t want to repeat your mistakes, but are you aware of what would really bring joy to your life? Your ideal relationship isn’t the opposite of what you don’t want.
Focus on creating a vision for your soulmate relationship that excites you and motivates you to start dating again. Get clear on the dynamic you desire between the two of you.
Don’t get caught up in unimportant details like height or hobbies. Your heart doesn’t care what color someone’s eyes are or whether they like the same movies you do.
The important thing is to focus on what you value. When you share the same values as your partner, you have the ability to overcome any challenge.
Moving past your divorce and meeting your soulmate requires that you have a clear vision of the relationship you desire and whether you can navigate conflict to create a deeper connection.
8. You’re ready to risk your heart again
Love doesn’t come with guarantees. None of these steps will protect you from ever being hurt again. But they will give you the tools to keep moving forward into healthier, more loving relationships along the way.
Cynicism and fear are your enemies when it comes to love. They keep your heart closed and prevent anyone from connecting with you. Don’t let fear stop you from opening your heart and taking a risk on love.
The biggest risk you can take is to feel hopeful about meeting your soulmate. Hope is the door that opens your heart to love again.
You're not meant to spend your life alone. Your soul craves the connection with a special person. You can certainly be single and happy, but if you really want to thrive in life, you’ll want to share your life with the love of your life.
With a little effort, you can overcome your past heartbreaks and develop new relationship skills.
When you mine your past disappointments to discover the gold that lies within, you may find that your split with your ex was the greatest advantage you could have received for meeting your soulmate.
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Orna and Matthew Walters are Soulmate Coaches who have been featured guest experts on Bravo’s "The Millionaire Matchmaker." They're the authors of the free ebook, "7 Steps To Soulmating," which can be found on their website.
This article was originally published at https://www.creatingloveonpurpose.com. Reprinted with permission from the author.