Getting to my first relationship after my divorce
By: Vaibhav Puri
Tags: Divorce, Self Improvement, Love

Getting back on the saddle was much harder than I thought

I got divorced in 2013 and it seems like so far away but I was living my divorce subconsciously for over seven years. For a large part of these seven years, when someone asked me if my divorce still affected me, I’d be quick to answer that “no” because that’s what I truly believed to be true, but the truth was that most of my actions and behaviour towards women was filled with distrust and contempt. My ex-wife is a good person and felt if she could leave me for her reasons then how can I trust any girl out there.

But slowly and steadily, I started dating again but in all my dates I’d always look for some sort of evidence to be non-comital in my relationships but all along I meet really nice people but was not able to see it. The only thing I never stopped doing was being honest to them and myself about what a relationship meant to me — something temporary. Because at the end, I was prepared to retire alone and was happy with that as an end to my life.

But in my post-divorce years, I got back into self-improvement — I lost weight, meditated and volunteered alot and also have become a good salsa dancer. Each improvement brought closer to being a happier person. As I kept going on and on with improvement, I noticed more empathy towards people and patience in myself but still my outlook didn’t really change, it just got lighter. I’d come to the conclusion that I just have not found the right person but I never did know what the right person is like or even try to look for her.

But then covid hit us and it changed my outlook towards life. I knew something had to change in my life and my relationships with friends and family mattered more than anything else.

Wanting a change, I moved from Madrid to Poland to try something new. As I started travelling across Poland and getting to know the place it felt very weird adjusting to a new place — I didn’t speak the language or even understand the culture. I didn’t understand why no one said “Hola” to me on the stairwell or why people were so quiet on public transport. But there was something that I experienced here that I first experienced when I moved to Madrid 11 years back — I had a chance to make a fresh start and let the child in me come out again. Each day is difficult for me, I have to ask for help for the smallest things — I have think what and how I am going to say something in polish in a store. But that’s allowed me to grow and be OK with failure again and also open myself to new experiences.

A relationship is the new experience I have accepted in my life and it’s tough because it puts all my years of self-improvement to the test. I think lots of work on myself, openess to re-trying a relationship and some luck has helped me alot.

Find a good relationship is more about us being ready and deserving to be in a good relationship than hoping “the right” person will appear and save us. The right person will only help you while you help yourself.

So in the end if you are someone feeling down after a deep relationship has gone wrong then the only advice I can give you through my experience is that self-improvement is the only way out. It helped me keep going when I didn’t know where to go.

Do hard things that make you a better person and at some point, it will make everything fall into place. I wasted time on blame and predicting my future based on my past.

My divorce saved my life as it gave the opportunity to build a skill that will allow me to be happy for most part of my life as long as I am ready to sweat it out.