The sound of a broken heart...

Can two people in a loving relationship be broken hearted? Of course. It happens everyday.

A relationship is a home for two people who love each other. In it they should find comfort, understanding, respect, honor, kindness, forgiveness, patience, love and freedom. What happens, though, is that the individual egos get in the way sabotaging the relationship. Instead of listening to each other, we judge what we are hearing, we become defensive, we think about what we want to say next, we think about something else completely or we don't listen at all. Listening involves more than attentively hearing what the other person may be saying, it involves listening to all of who our loved one is–with attention and silence, relinquishing our thoughts to truly understand. If we would listen wholly to each other, more relationships would survive and fewer hearts would be broken.

Ego gets in the way and we break each others' hearts. We don't see our loved one fairly and justly, we don't see their innocence, their vulnerability or their lovability. We want to be right, understood and validated. Yet we are not willing to offer the same. Instead of giving each other what we need, we seek to find what we want. We act out of fear that we will not be acknowledged, that we will not be right or that we will not be loved. We keep bringing up past hurts and future fears. We forget that the relationship belongs to both and that we both want to find home in each other.

To bring healing to the hearts in our relationships, let's listen, let's understand, let's comfort each other, let's not judge, let's give each other room to be...let's respect each others' thoughts and feelings. We love each other after all.

So what does a broken heart sound like? It is the deafening silence between the tears, the harsh tone of voice, the unwillingness to give up the argument, to say I'm sorry, to be love to one another.