Janie Davis Lane
You know that feeling when you wake up one morning, after a break-up, or even while you are still dating someone and you announce to yourself, quietly, especially if he is sleeping next to you, “Yup, I’m over that!” and then you jump out of bed with that it’s a new day glow plastered across your face ~ and a new game plan in hand. You walk into the bathroom, wash your face, look into the mirror and find staring back at you, a beautiful face, with a charming twinkle in her eye. A twinkle, so bewitching you momentarily forget the guy you are about to consider roadkill is still asleep in your bed.
In speaking with my girlfriends, I find this normally happens when you have the chance to stop analyzing the relationship, to sort through the ebbs and flows of the emotional roller-coaster and to think clearly about the sum of all the actions and reactions as they happened and how they have come to shape where you are today.
To me, relationship karma is not about he should suffer because he was a d-bag, it is about what I have learned from the past that will launch me into my future. Finding the ‘pay it forward’ and letting go of the want for vengeance. Being happy for the sad that comes to someone else, the guy, even his new girl, makes you feel worse in the long run. Instead, put yourself on a pedestal, have empathy because he cannot help the way he is, and for the new girl in his life too, because she is probably as blind to his tactics as you once were.
When a relationship ends, sometimes searching for the comical leads to finding the relationship karma. Why did that person, aka Mr. Karma, come into your life? What value, positive and negative, did he bring to it? Let go of any embarrassing acts still haunting your thoughts. We all do stupid things in relationships that we wished we hadn’t (and hopefully they will never surface on the Internet.)
I had delivered, in my mind, Mr. Karma his pink-slip a few days following a lovely night together. We were celebrating my birthday. I dressed in one of my favorite, little-blue-dresses and had my hair done. He brought me a lovely card and gift, took me for drinks and dinner where the food was delicious and three baritone waiters sang Happy Birthday to make my night perfect. He did all the right things. A night later, as I lay awake watching him sleep and snore like a one-man heavy metal Metallica concert, I knew my birthday evening was all an act. I knew it on my birthday, but as I did in the past, I let his charming magnetism make rainbows from storm clouds the uneasy feelings that were bottled up inside quickly dissipated.
Mr. Karma is a player and I had only recently allowed my brain to fully comprehend that. I had chosen to make excuses for his excuses, to ignore the lies and to go with the flow because the warm body next to me was better than no warm body at all. I feigned acceptance that he was telling the truth and never allowed myself to be that psycho girlfriend. I figured if I played nice he could never call me out for being anything less than classy.
As the sun rose the next day, I sat on the side of the bed, intently listening to Mr. Karma snore. With each ear-splitting inhale and exhale, I made a mental list of all the good that had come from the not-so-good relationship with Mr. Karma.
Moving to a new city alone, he helped me navigate. He took me to great places. He allowed me to introduce him to sexual pleasures that I enjoyed, that he had never indulged in prior. And, most importantly, he inspired me to get back to a hobby I had a passion for and had abandoned for years; writing. He ignited that spark that had been missing.
Without the tumultuous, crazy, fun, electrifying, game playing, entertaining, unbridled, jubilant, erotic, and truly wild liaison with Mr. Karma, I am not sure when I would have picked up writing again. So while the relationship did not yield the fairytale ending it did provide me something even more valuable.
And that, plain and simple, is relationship karma.
I challenged each of my girlfriends and now I challenge you. Find the good relationship karma in past relationships and as you go forward into new relationships. Ignore the negative, narcissistic, manipulative, dysfunctional and drama-filled antics of your Mr. Karma and dig deep to find the underlying good that the relationship provided you.
Stay tuned…