Being with a Partner Who Still Loves Someone They've Lost

I've been in a relationship for the past couple of years with a woman who lost her previous lover, prematurely, in a tragic way. He was a man with whom she'd envisioned spending the rest of her life. Fate, it seems, had other plans. Our connection initially grew strong during her process of grieving; it grew to deep friendship, and from there it developed into intimacy and commitment.

It's often been a struggle for me not to feel like I'm living in the shadow of this man. After all, my partner never chose to leave him - nor he her. How such a situation can complicate one's emotional responses! Every joy, every sensation of fulfillment and breakthrough, can be tinged with accompanying sadness and even guilt. Am I wrong in feeling blessed for what has come into my life, knowing that it was only purchased at the expense of someone else?

Such a sense of misgiving is obviously useless. The past cannot be undone, and those of us who survive are obliged to move forward in the journey of our lives. We can repeat the "what-ifs" and "if onlys" forever, but such mantras do nothing to restore what has been lost.

When someone you love is still attached, in some ways, to someone who is no longer with us, you can sometimes feel like an intruder in your own relationship. Perhaps we men are hard-wired, from the millennia of instinctual living in our race's past, to feel territorial and possessive. When we are committed to someone, we want to feel that this person is ours without a shadow of a doubt. Of course, this too is an illusion. None of us love only one person exclusively. There's little difference between the love that exists between spouses, between parents and children, or even between human beings and beloved pets. Only the expressions of that love vary.

So it seems that the way we're expressing our love is the only thing that we need concern ourselves with. Imagining how our lives could've been different if this circumstance or that had been changed does nothing to alter our reality in the present. It's natural to grieve for someone who you've lost, and just as natural to choose to move on with your life after a certain time. If the souls of those departed could speak to us (many claim that they can) they would probably encourage us to do just that. What good do our doubts and guilt do them?

The challenge of being there with someone who still has an emotional attachment to a previous lover can actually be a good way to break the stranglehold of the ego, that part of ourselves that feels threatened by anything that it can't control. Putting our trust in the greater love, rather than the ego's demands, can teach us that we don't have to be in control all the time. We're better able, then, to see the beauty in what we have and not be pestered with fears that some ghost from the past is going to take it away from us.