Love Heals – If You Let It
“Love heals,” Grammy Award-winning musician Miguel captioned a February Instagram post of him and his wife, Nazanin Mandi. The post was a happy surprise to the pair’s fans following the public announcement of their separation in September of last year, according to Vanity Fair. After meeting at ages 18 and 19, Naz and Miguel dated for ten years before getting engaged in 2016 and eventually marrying two years later. After almost two decades together, Mandi told E!News, “there's a lot of growth. There's a lot of growing pains and all through our twenties was the time to get our minds right, to really find ourselves and through that process, fortunately, we grew together and not apart,”
Their success story begs an important question: How can love heal when love is also the very thing that broke you?
If there is anything that I’ve learned as a college student in New York City, it’s that finding love now is about as easy as finding it in middle school. I’m realizing, even more, each day that the adults around me couldn’t be more childish when it comes to love, not because they’re immature, but because they are wounded.
None of us are fortunate enough to escape trauma, no matter how minuscule or immense. The world can be a cruel place, almost as cruel as love can be. But by remaining in our unidentified or unacknowledged pain, we hurt not only ourselves but our future relationships.
Healing as a methodology is one that is sweeping across social media. To date, “#healing” has 8.5 Billion views on TikTok and is attached to 33.2 million posts on Instagram. Often riddled with “Girlboss” ideology- you know the kind that encourages hyper-independence and condemns reaching out for help- “it doesn't acknowledge that it's okay to need people,” says Sasha Dubose, a second-year at NYU. “Especially for women and femmes, I don't think social media properly holds space for our pain,” they continue.
We often associate healing on social media with perfectly aesthetic quotes telling us to release what no longer serves us or encouraging us to hibernate all “healing girl summer” long. The dictionary definition of healing, however, is “the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.” The “why” of healing is quite simple: to ease your pain. It’s failing to notice what needs healing and how to do so that often tears our relationships- past, present, and future- apart.
“Healing has one really important ingredient: radical acceptance,” says dating expert and coach, Rikki Dymond. Following her divorce seven years ago, Dymond found that “a big part of healing is letting go of what you thought your life should be or should have been. To heal is to identify your negative patterns, loops, and destructive behaviors. It takes a lot of reflection, and a lot of outside perspectives.” The second step of healing, she continues, is accepting yourself: “learning how to be happy on your own without a partner, learning how to cultivate that happiness from within, finding self-love, and creating a life that brings you joy.” If you can do this before entering a new relationship, then you're going to set yourself up to be in a place where you can identify the right and wrong people entering your life.
According to Dymond and others, self-awareness is key to both healing yourself and navigating healthy relationships. According to Maxwell Murray, a second-year at NYU and CEO of FITS, “if you don't have any self-awareness, then you'll crash and burn in all of your relationships in the future. You'll take all of that damage, and you'll apply it to the next situation.”
You cannot heal what you don’t know is hurting, however. For love to heal, we each must accept our responsibility to do so. This process becomes easier, of course, with support- something men tend to lack when it comes to healing emotional trauma. Chad Thomas, a third-year at NYU, says, “we're conditioned not to come to terms with emotional pain. We want to communicate our emotions, but we’re often worried about coming off as soft.”
Thomas is not alone in his analysis of how men view healing. Considered an inherently feminine process, healing is often a taboo subject in male spaces. Dymond mentions, “one way that we can support men in their healing as women who become partners of men is to be an avenue of love and emotion for them. If you can be so comfortable in your emotions and your own healing that you can create a safe and loving space, then your partner can come into that with you.”
Our modern interpretation of healing being a journey, rather than a destination, makes its pursuit that much more daunting. Though we should be in the constant pursuit of healing, doing so does not imply that we are in a constant state of pain. “Having a paper cut does not mean you are on your deathbed,” explains Kuniya Asobayire, a second-year at NYU. Healing is frequently perceived as a period of self-isolation, but “I think shutting yourself away seems like a safe option,” Asobayire mentions. “We’re not getting any younger.”
Sometimes, the final step of your healing journey is giving it another go. “I am scared to relive some of the things that happened in my past relationship,” says Murray. “I've closed the door to relationships of potentially really good people that could have helped me heal in ways that I couldn’t on my own.”
Love heals only after you have taken on the responsibility of healing yourself. Only then does healing come through living, and finally through loving.