Have you ever been in a bad relationship? Are you still in one? Are you sure?
Okay, let's back up a second and analyze this. Generally speaking, people marry in an attempt to maximize their happiness and improve the quality of their lives. In that context to you, marrying the wrong person feels like a waste of happiness and a loss in the quality of your life.
And the way you reached this conclusion is by realizing you are actually NOT happy. Feelings of unhappiness kept begging for your attention on a daily basis until they could no longer be ignored.
So being prompted by how you feel in the present made you look back in the past and put things in perspective. And it doesn't look good, it's not pretty, and upon closer inspection actually, it's pretty bad.
Now it's not just the present feelings who are trying to tell you something but the same message is validated by the past as well. At this point, regrets are pouring in and it's overwhelming.
The problem and the opportunity. If you continue to regret a relationship long after it has ended, although you might feel this is natural and feel justified, that's still you wasting additional time, wasting even more potential happiness, in a bad relationship that no longer exists.
Your mind goes round and round: -If I would not marry the wrong person I would have saved all that time; -X years down the drain; -It was a terrible idea; -Why did I stay for so long?
If any of that sounds familiar here is the good news. Bad relationships are bad because how they make you feel, but if you learn they will actually make your life better.
Marrying the wrong person and staying in the wrong relationship for way longer than you should, is a fantastic way to learn two very important things about yourself: what you want and what you don't want, what makes you happy and what makes you unhappy.
A bad relationship outside makes you stronger and more connected inside. Maybe you lost a good friend but you earned a best friend in the process.
And here is the interesting part, not knowing who you really were before heading into a long-term relationship is the very problem that created this mess in the first place. Bad relationships happen because of misaligned values, and of course, you cannot align with something you don't know. Makes sense?
