The Day My Life Fell Apart—and What It Taught Me About Love
On June 2, 2014, my life fell apart. My mother had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given three months to live. And that morning, I suffered my third miscarriage, and my husband left me. He broke up with me over the phone.
First, he texted me. I was outside our building, sitting on a bench with my dog. I already knew something was very wrong. I hadn't heard from him all day, even though that morning I had woken up to what my gynecologist confirmed was a miscarriage. I had an uneasy gut feeling that I was going to be abandoned. When my husband finally texted me at about 5 p.m., all he wrote was, "I'm staying at my parents for a few days."
Panicked, I called him. Thankfully, he picked up. The twenty minutes that followed were some of the worst moments of my life. "We're just on two different paths, Jillian," I remember him saying.
"What!? What the fuck are you saying? You're just not going to come home? I'm bleeding uncontrollably because I am no longer pregnant, and you're just going to leave?" At this point I was pacing up and down the street and felt—and probably looked—like a complete madwoman.
I knew my ex and I were struggling—really struggling. I'd spent the past two years working my ass off trying to convince him I was lovable. A part of me knew, deep in my bones, that he was capable of leaving me abruptly. And a bigger part of me, deep in my soul, wished for the ordeal of our marriage to be over. Walking away, however, was never an option. I was way too afraid to be without him.
He never came home.
My life had officially fallen apart. June 2 marked not only the end of my life as I knew it but also the beginning of my journey to figure out what the hell it takes to have a healthy and lasting relationship. What I learned surprised me. It has very little to do with luck, the universe, age, or even being a good person. Instead, it has everything to do with the relationship we have with ourselves. I learned that if we want a meaningful relationship filled with connection, security, and intimacy, we have to take responsibility. I learned that a relationship is like a mirror: it will reflect to us the relationship we have with ourselves.
This is not about shame or blaming ourselves. I want you to feel powerful and to know that you hold the key to the change you want to see in your love life. Yes, even if you consider yourself anxiously attached or avoidant or have faced some other problem within yourself. You can be in a healthy relationship. You're not broken, or doomed to be alone forever, or forever unhappy in your love life. You don't have to let your attachment style or your past limit you. This is about creating change.
When I met my ex-husband, I thought I was mature and ready for a truly loving and conscious partnership. I had been a yogi for twelve years and had taught yoga for eight. I'd been in several relationships, and the relationship roadkill of my past included an abusive relationship, which I had processed and overcome. I had been in therapy before. I did have a thorn in my side about my father and our relationship (more on that later), but that was a thorn I believed would never go away, so I had adapted to living with it. I had a blueprint of what I believed a relationship should be: find the person who gives you butterflies, make sure they treat you well, and when you get married, you'll have a companion for life.
My marriage lasted two painful years. Turns out that being an intelligent, intuitive, and kind yoga teacher who had been in therapy before was not enough to make a marriage work. I had major blind spots, and despite all my study of the mind-body connection, as well as the awareness that I had a history of daddy issues, my love life had become a total mess. That mess is what motivated me to plunge deep into the parts of myself I had never considered before—including my emotions, my beliefs, my fears, and my behavior.
Missing from my relationship blueprint was this reality: the relationship we have with ourselves is the most important relationship we will ever have, and we will have to continuously work on that relationship to break through the barriers that prevent us from true emotional intimacy with another person. The most valuable lesson I learned about relationships from my marriage was that no relationship has a chance if we don't look within and do the necessary self-examination required to make it work. When we improve the relationship we have with ourselves, we improve our relationship with others. This is an absolute truth.
Excerpted from It Begins with You by Jillian Turecki and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2025.
