241, Remarried and So Sad

One of the most common questions Nora gets from people is “how do you love someone new after losing another person you loved?” Today she answers that question.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

This is for anyone trying to live in the both/and.

Anyone trying to hold onto what was, and make room for what is.

Anyone who is moving forward with the lessons and love of their lived their experiences, not moving on from them.

I get more than a few emails from people who are in a very specific situation: they’ve lost their partner — to death, not a random misplacement — and they have also found themselves in a new relationship, with a big, new love. 

One arrived with the same subject line you see here — remarried and so sad.

She is sad because she misses her first husband. And because she thinks that her sadness is an inconvenience to her new husband, that it invalidates her current happiness, that it proves that this love is just not as good as the one before it.

It must be a natural human inclination to try to weigh our love the same way we weigh our pain, to rank and sort them, arrange them in trophy case so everyone can see what we earned and how.

When I was younger and dumber, when I was careless with hearts — my own and others — I thought of love as a finite resource. I minimized relationships as soon as they were over. It wasn’t love. It was nothing. It was silly. 

It was silly of me to act that way! To pretend like the only love that counted was the one that lasted forever. Because what’s forever, anyway? 

I always find a new way to reply to these messages, because every one of them reopens my own scars in a new way. Because I had this same fear when my husband died and I fell in love again: that it would be too much, that I would be too much. And for the wrong person, I would be. It would be.

Not everyone knows that our hearts are actually like the room of requirement at Hogwarts. Not everyone is that familiar with Harry Potter, I guess? Not everyone has felt their own heart grow and adapt to their experiences, has felt love expand to fit everyone around them.

But if you have, you would know that the craziest thing about love is that there is always more. It is endless. And the more we spend, the more we get back.

That your heart can hold love for the person you lost — the lives you lost — and the person you’re with right now. They do not cancel each other out. They are not in competition with each other. 

Isn’t your husband jealous? People have said to me. And of course he is! He’d rather be DEAD than be married to me! 

But what is there to envy that isn’t his? 

I tell this woman that she is sad because it’s sad when a person dies, that marriage is not a cure for a broken heart, but a broken heart does not preclude you from loving again.

That her sadness, her sorrow, is as holy as her love. For the husband that was. The husband that is.

I don’t know her husband, but I like to assume that we are not too much for anyone who says they love us. That the people who love us are mostly hoping they are doing the right thing, and in between doing what they hope is the right thing, standing around and wringing their hands and awaiting further instructions.

If you think it’s too much for someone…ask them.

Ask them what it feels like. What love means to them. How your pasts and presents can braid together into a shared future. 

You are allowed to be sad about sad things. And to be sad about happy things. To experience a whole buffet of human emotions and experiences even when you’d really rather order them a la carte at your own convenience. Too bad! It’s a buffet! Take a fresh plate with every trip and don’t forget to load it up to the max! Everything touches! Cross contamination is inevitable!

If you are sad, that’s okay. It’s not all that you are, and it’s not all that you’ll ever be.