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If you knew me from before, you might have wondered why I stopped sharing about my relationship. The truth is Rapha and I have separated since early 2019.

I was unable to write about our divorce for a long time. Although I knew it was the right decision for both of us, I felt too ashamed.

2 years before the divorce, I had published a self-help book on relationships. I myself was a relationship coach.

So what does the divorce say about my work? And more importantly, my identity?

I battled with these debilitating feelings, got lost in my dark nights of the soul, and found my way through with the support of loved ones.

While I no longer feel ashamed, I still find divorce difficult to talk about because of the stigma it carries.

Where I come from, you just don’t get a divorce. The right thing to do is to stick it out, no matter what. A woman who gets a divorce is a woman who fails.

Yet, my soul kept calling me to open up and tell my story.

Few days ago, I read a quote from Brene Brown: You either walk into your story and own your truth, or you live outside of your story, hustling for worthiness.

Telling this story is me doing the work of owning it.

I also hope that this may inspire others to more openness, more vulnerability, more courage.

As you read this, please know that I’m not writing a divorce prescription, I’m simply telling my story.

Sometimes, the most courageous choice you can make is to say: “I’m not going to let go, even if it’s hard.” Other times, the most courageous choice you can make is to say: “I need to let go, even if it hurts.”

Each relationship is different. You need to make this choice without reference to anything but what’s within your deepest, most mature heart. Not your mother, not your best friend, not your society, and especially not your fear.

Milena+Nguyen+What+I+learned+through+my+divorce — *“It dawned upon us that the most loving decision was to allow our relationship to transform.”*

Rapha and I began our relationship when I was 22 and he was 25. Like most people in their 20s, we had little idea about who we were and what we wanted.

We gained more self-awareness as we grew together. After 7 years, the realization slowly became clear: what we wanted, needed, and are called for in life are very different.

Our universes grew gradually apart. We could listen while the other person shared about their world, but we couldn’t quite participate in that world.

Our true natures were like a cactus and a fish. One belongs to the desert. The other to the sea. When we tried to move to the other person’s habitat, our aliveness withered.

Of course, we were in denial of this truth for a long time.

One morning, after months working with my coach to look into the lifelessness that was lurking beneath the surface of my life, a spell broke.

I turned to Rapha and told him something I didn’t want to admit even to myself: “I’m not happy.” That’s when we began facing the truth.

Divorce doesn’t have to be a destruction. It can be a transition.

We tried different things but all effort felt like stopping a caterpillar from dissolving inside its cocoon, desperately trying to reverse a natural process in which something was destined to die, so a new form can take shape.

Eventually, it dawned upon us that the most loving decision was to allow our relationship to transform - from marriage to something else, which we couldn’t find a word in the dictionary to name it so we made one up: soul-friendship.

I’ve learned that divorce doesn’t have to be a destruction. It can be a transition from one form of love to another. That new form can allow you even more growth, more freedom, more love.

To love is to set the beloved free.

When the relationship is aching to change shape, it’s important to allow ourselves that possibility, not holding onto one rigid form just because it fits the success story told by our culture and the fear story told by us.

I don’t think our souls come here to Earth to get married and stay married forever. Our souls are here to evolve.

In different phases of life, the relationship between two persons needs to transform in order to make room for their soul’s evolution.

This isn’t just in a couple relationships, but any relationship.

The second thing I’ve learned is that success in a relationship isn’t defined by the length of the relationship but in the depth of it.

It’s easy to look at a divorce and call a relationship “failure”.

What if real success lies not in the number of years you spend side by side, but in what you create together, how much you learn on the journey and how the relationship has touched and transformed your human hearts.

In that sense, our relationship was a success.

Our relationship has grown us and changed us in ways we couldn’t imagine. We would never be where we are and who we are without it. We wouldn’t change it for anything.

We’re proud of our journey. The one we had together, and the different ones we are embarking on, still carrying the imprints of the 7 years we shared like precious gifts for the path.

We’re so grateful for our family, friends and community who have witnessed our love. For our wedding guests who danced and sang with us on that joyous celebration. Your blessings stay in our hearts, caressing our footsteps onto new adventures.

Life gives your heart what it can handle, even when you don’t believe so.

Being able to write these reflections now doesn’t mean we didn’t grieve and my heart didn’t crack and that I wasn't afraid.

There were late nights where Rapha and I sat with each other in silence, crying wordless tears.

There were early mornings when I curled up in my bed alone, thinking that this grief, this sadness, this fear, this excruciating loneliness would swallow me whole.

But the pain taught me that the fibers of our hearts are indestructible.

Trust me, life gives your heart what it can handle, even when you don’t believe so. Your pain isn’t meaningless, it is here for the heart to blossom.

This third and final lesson echoes what Rumi wrote:

You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

You have within you more love than you could ever understand.

My heart broke open for the light to get in. Bathing in that light, it revived itself.

And right when I was convinced that I’d need a few years in solitude before another relationship, like a miracle, my heart chose to love again - with more intensity, strength, and depth than I could ever understand.

That love manifested in the 18-week baby girl I’m carrying in my belly.

It manifested in the peace I feel in my body when I wake up next to my now partner, the father of my child, still amazed by the oceanic current of love that swept us away and how we chose to trust it.

But this is another story, for another time.

Milena xo

P.S:

To my beloved readers of 10,000 Miles for Love, I didn’t take the book down because I still stand by what I wrote and believe in its values. Rapha and I were able to handle our transition with such grace and compassion thanks to the strength we gained in our long-distance love.

I wish you courage on the path you choose. No matter how things turn out in the end, never regret choosing love.