“Right person, wrong time:” the four words that keep me up at night, the syllables that haunt me to my very core, the very sounds that make me rethink each and every breakup of my dating career. Strangely enough, I first encountered these words after the miserable loss of my supposed “soulmate.” Apparently this sentiment was intended to comfort me—that sometimes in life, we simply lose the people we love, not because of our own wrongdoings and missteps, but solely because timing is a horribly inconsiderate bitch. This idea gave me no such comfort. To me, it only meant surrendering the most important person in my life, to something as seemingly arbitrary as time.
And while I can already hear the voices saying, “everything happens for a reason,” the voice inside my head can’t help but roll its eyes. I want to be frustrated. I want to be sad. I don’t want to scoff and say, “everything happens for a reason.” And quite honestly, I don’t want to believe that we lose the things and people that make us the happiest, simply because some unknown reason might or might not linger somewhere in the universe.
So what then? Do I and the others like me simply sit around, angry at the thought that people fall out of love over work, and illness, and the other woman’s of the world? Or even worse, do I let myself grow enraged at the thought that people may fall out of love for no seemingly no good reason at all? And the answer is, I have no idea.
All I do know is that I am one of many whose seemingly perfect relationship fell apart; I am not the first to be broken up with “out of the blue,” and life will go on–but it doesn’t mean I don’t get to be upset about it.
Sometimes I believe I might be better off with an “everything happens for a reason” screensaver, and a pocket-sized version of inspirational quotes about love and fate. Other times, I believe that I, and the many others that are angry at fate and time, and those who preach it, have every right to be. After all, is it really natural or with our instinct to accept defeat, and let things we love go? Or rather, would it all make much more sense if we fought for what we loved until the very end, until we knew with absolutely certainty that it wasn’t “meant to be,” instead of trusting something as unreliable as destiny.
And while I may not have the answers, what I can tell you is that it is okay to scream and cry, and throw a fit in these losses. But after you’ve taken the moments to stalk your exes’ Instagram, and curse the bad timing that seemed to ruin your greatest love, you have to pick yourself up, and realize that you might never be powerful enough to fight against the destiny and fate we love to hate. And for most of you, including myself, I’m sure that someday you’ll be thankful for the timing that took away the person you only thought was your “right person.”