Love & Jelly Beans

Imagine everyone has a big bowl full of jelly beans. These jelly beans represent ‘love’ in your life. When you meet someone you care about, you give them some of your jelly beans. When you decide to have a monogamous relationship with someone, you give them all of your jelly beans and they give you all of theirs. You have to trust that this other person is going to be careful with your jelly beans. Hurting you is like spilling some of your beans. When someone does something so hurtful that you decide to end the relationship, it’s like spilling all of your beans. Before you can start giving away your beans again, you have to spend time picking them all up; you have to heal. You can think of this as heartbreak, and we all deal with this period of time differently. The most common reaction is to pull back a little and work on yourself; picking up jelly beans is about learning to love yourself again. Additionally, those who are truly happy are likely always working on adding jelly beans to their bowl, rather than only doing so when they are single. If you jump right back into dating before you have healed, it can be difficult to hide the pain you still feel for the previous relationship(s). This would be like starting to give away your beans before you have collected them all again and that, as you can imagine, is hard to do.

Some people may guard their jelly beans and give away fewer than they receive. Others may be careless and give away too many beans to people who don't deserve them: people who treat them poorly, or are reckless and irresponsible with their feelings. Some people, like me, prefer to spread their beans around, trading beans with many wonderful people. One of the big benefits of this is that if someone drops a few of my beans, it's not that big a deal for me to spend the time to pick them up. I also get to experience many unique kinds of jelly beans; just like us, the love we have to offer others is unique.  Perhaps I am not as invested in any one person, because I am not relying on them to be responsible for all of my jelly beans, but I am fine with that. I have taken responsibility for my own jelly beans and for making sure my bowl is always full. This is why I have not had to live with heartbreak for years, and my bowl of jelly beans is positively overflowing!