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When a bitter breakup has brought you to your emotional knees, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever love again. But like the saying goes, time heals all wounds – and if you open up your heart again, it’s possible true love can find you. I’m not suggesting that you jump right back into dating before your tears have dried and your hurt has healed; it’s actually wise to take some time to reflect and reconnect with yourself after a breakup. But once you’ve let some time go by, you may start to wonder if you’re up for the challenge of dating again. Not sure if you’re ready yet? Here are some signs you may be ready to give love another try.

If there was one thing I used to resent myself for, it was the way that I would fight tooth and nail to hold together a relationship that was clearly over. I mean, I would be so emotionally worn-out by the time I finally accepted that the relationship was coming to an end. Not even because of the nature of the break up, but because of how hard I would fight to hold everything together. I never slowed down long enough to even ask myself if there was anything left in the relationship worth saving. All I knew was that I was about to lose something, and I don’t like losing things. I would be like an insane person, sitting at a table with a pile of broken glass from a shattered mirror in front of me. With my fingers all cut up and bleeding, I’d attempt to glue the slivers of glass that once formed the mirror back together. Of course, in the end, I’d never achieve the goal of putting the mirror (relationship) back together fully, at least not permanently anyway, because in many cases, once it’s broken, it’s broken.

One day, it dawned on me that once a season (or relationship) is over, there’s not much you can do to bring it back and sometimes attempting to do anything and everything to piece it back together only makes things more painful and strained. As I reflect on past relationships, it amazes me how much emotional energy could have been saved and pain that could’ve been avoided if I just accepted the fact that the relationship had simply run its course and it was time to move on. I also eventually realized that we sometimes aren’t even actually fighting for the person themselves, but for what being with them represents and against what not being with them symbolizes. We commonly associate break-ups with failure because to some of us, it means admitting that we were wrong–wrong about a person we trusted. It means admitting that while we thought this person was the one, we somehow miscalculated something, somewhere along the way.

Cutting your losses and moving on doesn’t mean that you didn’t love or care about the person because you’re being realistic about the fact that it’s over. It just means you love yourself enough not to constantly subject yourself to the pain of forcing something that’s finished. Everywhere you turn, we’re being told that love is worth fighting for and while I do believe this is true, there are some instances when fighting against a break-up is only prolonging the inevitable, especially when the other party makes it clear that they have no interest in salvaging what’s left of the relationship.

Breaking up doesn’t always require crying, begging, pleading, struggling or even getting indignant. You don’t have to always do something to spite the person just because they hurt you. You don’t have to seek revenge. You don’t have to struggle to make that person stay with you, because the truth of the matter is that when a person desires to end a relationship, they’re gone long before they actually leave anyway. Sometimes breaking up means being mature enough to understand that the love is gone and and it’s best for your growth as a person and happiness if you move forward. Sometimes it means being lady enough to depart from where you’re no longer desired, but recognizing that somewhere down the road you’ll meet someone who will. Sometimes it means leaving with your dignity in tact. Sometimes breaking up simply means taking a deep breath and letting go.

Follow Jazmine on Twitter @jazminedenise

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The vast majority of my friends are in their mid twenties to early thirties and their lives are littered with questions.  Questions of whether they are on the right path, whether they will ever find true love, whether the love they have found will last forever, whether it is possible to find both contentment and financial security in jobs that they have chosen, whether they will ever find the courage to leave jobs that they hate to pursue what they love, whether they will be good partners and good parents, whether they will have continued health so that they are able to raise their children, whether they are fulfilling their life’s purpose, and whether it is wise to wonder about anything that swirls around in their minds at all.

The questions we ask at 20 are much different than the questions we ask at 30, but we all seem to be consumed by questions about our lives and if we’re doing things right.  The funny thing is if we just keep on living, life has a way of providing the answers to the questions that we all ask at one time or another.  Zora Neale Hurston, who I have great respect and adoration for, eloquently pens in her 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God that “there are years that ask questions and years that answer.”  There is great profundity in her words.

The questions that individuals have about their lives, and life in general, in their twenties are often debilitating.  You can get lost for hours in a tsunami of thought obsessing over life, and love, and spirituality, and purpose.  Yet it seems that when you veer closer to 30 than to 20, that although the questions do not stop, they do become less frantic and frenzied.  The decade of life that exists between one milestone of an age to another provides insight that was not foreseen in years past.  The older we become, the more clarity we receive.

If I could give my younger self any advice, I would look her square in the eyes and submit the popular colloquialism “you gotta chill.”  I submit that same advice to you.  Whether you be 20, 30 or beyond, the years will answer the questions that burn in your heart.  Don’t waste precious years that you can never retrieve stuck on questions about the past, present or future.  Instead, get busy crafting and creating the reality you want for yourself today.  If there is something that exists in your life that you are unhappy about or uncomfortable with, the power exists in you to change it.   Do all of the things that you want to do.  Live your life to fullest and without a single regret.  Fill your existence with the experiences and discoveries that you’ve always wanted to have.  This life of yours is the only one that you’ll have and you should live it in a fashion that when your sun sets people will say of you what Hurston said of her iconic character Janie, “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

Sheena Bryant is a writer and blogger in Chicago.  Follow her on twitter at @song_of_herself.  

As a woman, when someone has done you dirty in a relationship, it can be hard to let it go. No one wants to feel like they’ve been played to the left. It’s only natural that you would harbor a grudge towards that person, at least for a little while.

But things can go from normal to downright dysfunctional, when the grudge you’re so lovingly holding on to, starts to consume every aspect of your life.

Find out how you can get rid of the grudge at Your Tango.com.

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So many of us fail to realize that until we address and move beyond the issues that plague us, we won’t be able to move forward and receive all that life has for us.

Some of us are weighed down by baggage we don’t even know we’re carrying.

Make sure you’re not a woman plagued by your past relationships. Check out a list of things you need to release at Hello Beautiful.com.

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