What it really comes down to is stop expecting people to be perfect. They will always fail. Always. As you’re looking for a spouse, don’t settle for someone evil, but don’t expect them to be perfect either. Throw away your expectations and trust God to give you someone who will help refine you. Throw away your expectations and work on letting God refine you as you are now. We get marriage incredibly wrong; it’s not just for your enjoyment, it’s to make you a better believer, a more faithful child. So stop throwing away perfectly good men and women because they don’t meet your absurd expectations of perfection; your golden calf is doing you no good at all. And until you let God take that down, you’ll always be disappointed by the person He brings you to marry.

My point is that, knowing this, it’s easier to believe that you’re permanently tied to a person in a way you can’t touch/influence than it is to do the work of detaching yourself from someone who did not choose to love you. It’s easier to believe your soul is attached to someone who made you happy than it is to believe that, eventually, you’ll be able to move on to love and be loved again. It’s easier to live in a fantasy, a knight’s tale, than it is to believe life doesn’t work out like the princess stories all the time, and sometimes you have to grieve and move on.