It’s a bittersweet story that almost everyone has experienced at some point in their life. You meet someone who just seems to be everything you’ve ever been looking for. They make you feel so incredibly alive and for a second, you start to believe that maybe the universe decided to make your next chapter a good one.
And then you find out that there’s a catch, as it seems there always is. It’s as if life decided to mess with you in a cruel way by dangling something good in front of your face only to take it away. Whether it be due to distance, lack of maturity or some other reason, it always hurts when you finally find someone who has all the right ingredients but something prevents anything from progressing. In other words, it’s a punch to the gut, especially because it feels like had this one circumstance not occurred, everything would have been perfect.
Your instinctive reaction might be to brush this off as the right person at the wrong time. But take a closer look at what that phrase means and its hidden implications and you’ll realize that that might not be the case at all.
Think about everything memorable that has occurred in your life. Those memories have all been an accumulation of millions of little events that have happened to reach that moment where everything either aligned perfectly or horribly. Those little events and memorable moments then shape the person you become and creates the character development that occurs as a result. This is why as you expose yourself to the world and new people and step out of your comfort zone. You slowly start to change over time as you open yourself to more opportunities to make more of those memorable moments.
Now revisit that original scenario. Maybe as time passes, there is the chance that the other person would be in a position where they would be ready to wholeheartedly be with you. But by then, you will have become a different person. You will have had new experiences that will have changed what you value and ultimately changed who you are and, thus, changed what you need in a relationship. The things you wanted so badly, back when you wished the circumstances were different so you could be with this person, might not even be what you want anymore.
In other words, there is no such thing as the right person at the wrong time. If the timing was wrong back then, then that means they would not have been the right person to begin with. Any situation where people are able to rekindle what they once had is merely luck. Specifically, luck that the different life experiences and moments that both people went through resulted in changes that ensured they were still compatible with each other. And as simple as that might sound, it really isn’t. It’s merely a gamble with life where you leave it up to chance.