You may have seen an article of mine a while back about how I found my true love. It was a beautiful, magical fairytale. He was…let’s just call him Prince Charming…perfect in every way. He was gorgeous, mature, strong, funny, generous, honest, spiritual and someone I would call a “real man”. Basically you don’t find a guy like that every day.

We even talked about marriage and kids after 2 days together…before we even had our first kiss. As he carried me around in his arms, strangers would point at us on the streets and tell us that we are meant for each other. In fact, even my grandma was planning our wedding from day one!

He would wake me up every morning with poems that he wrote about how beautiful I was. He would sing songs to me as we sat by the fire in the perfect green fields. He was just as adventurous as me and would happily stay in a tent for a week, and at the same time took me to the fanciest places too. After 2 weeks of knowing each other, he took me on a weekend trip to Paris, just because.

He wanted to build us a home with his bare hands. He had the same values as me when it came to life, children, food, everything. He was open and communicative. We could be completely ourselves with each other, even down to my girliest playlist.

So far this seems like the perfect love story, doesn’t it? So why on earth would I want to mess it up?

Sometimes you don’t know the bigger picture

I was living in London at the time. That was 2011 I believe. We were living apart so he came to visit me for 10 days.

From the moment he landed at Heathrow, I knew that something was different. Something inside me rejected him on all levels. It’s not that he was different, it’s not that I stopped loving him, but something was off and I couldn’t tell what.

I thought it would go away, but as the days passed, I knew that this relationship would stop me from doing something else in life. I had no idea what or how to explain it. He asked me, “I get the feeling you just want to be friends..?” I had to say “yes”.

The realisation

A few months after that I got a calling. I began to get sick at my job, sitting in a fancy office on Leicester square, doing mobile advertising. After a spontaneous spark of intuition, I got up from my desk, called my mum and said, “I’m moving to Bali”. Surprisingly, she immediately said, “Awesome, go for it!” and so I did. I quit my job and left 3 weeks later.

No plan. No job. 900€ in my pocket. And a whole load of trust that everything will work out just perfectly.

Unknown to me at the time, life thought I would be better off travelling the world, instead of living in a beautiful house built by the bare hands of my beloved and 3 kids running around.

5 years later

Prince Charming and I are still good friends. He’s married now and just recently had his first son. He still calls me “sunshine” and is always a pleasure to talk to, but no romantic feelings ever came back between us.

And I’m still travelling the world, learning a lot about life and myself with every passing day. I wrote about some lessons I learn from Bali, but so much has happened in the last 5 years that I can’t keep up with the writing, which is why I wanted to share a couple of key things I learnt with you.

Why I don’t regret letting go of the man of my dreams

Coming from a background where getting married and having kids is the ultimate accomplishment in life, this is a pretty odd thing for me to say, but I honestly don’t regret the decision I made.

I learnt so much from the last 5 years that I could never get if I were to have settled down. Want to hear a few of them? There are all very personal to me, so you certainly don’t have to agree with them by the way.

• I fixed my relationship with my dad, which was always holding me back from relationships with men.
• I got to see and live in some amazing places, from Machu Picchu (Peru) to Angkor Wat (Cambodia).
• I realised that I need to release my emotions and not keep things bottled up, even through swearing, which I never did before.
• I got to do whatever I wanted, if you’re with someone, there’s always something you compromise about, he wants to go here, I want to go there. This time allowed me to just be myself.
• But then I also learnt that I have to be myself completely with my next partner, otherwise, whats the point?
• I discovered tantra and that has flipped my life upside down in more than one way.

• I felt pleasures I didn’t know were possible, and probably wouldn’t have experienced had I stayed with one man for the rest of my life.
• I used to say “I will never do…” for many things in my life, from polyamory to ayahuasca. Life threw all of them at me. I accepted them all and grew from each experience.
• I experienced a tremendous heartbreak, which caused a tremendous heart-opening.
• I discovered many different spiritual paths and teachers, and even had an enlightening experience that has changed the way I see the world forever.
• I found some passions in life that I never knew I had, from raw chocolate and photography to paragliding and dancing.

• I learnt that if you trust, and I mean truly trust the Universe, it will take care of you in every way, even sometimes in ways you can’t even imagine.
• I learnt that you don’t always know what you want. If you just surrender and accept things, life may surprise you in the most magical ways.
• I challenged parts of me that I used to fear, be embarrassed about or ignored.
• I’ve experienced life from the point of view of different cultures, from dining at a secret luxury hotel in the middle of the jungle, to sleeping on the floor in India surrounded by cats.

• I finally came to the understanding that I am complete on my own. Happy to be with someone of course, but no attachments, expectations or desperation to need to be with someone. Before, I felt incomplete without a partner.
• I have discovered the true value of friendship.
• I realised that no matter how scary the future may be, it’s always better to take a leap of faith than being stuck in a situation where you’re not having fun.
• I feel stronger in every way, from speaking about meditation with my dad (who thinks I’m in a sect..) to hiking with a man I met the day before through the Himalayas.
• I am continually learning not to live on other people’s programs. So many people expect you to be a certain way, but the question is, how do YOU want to be?

Ok I think that’s enough reasons to explain why I gave up Prince Charming, although there’s so much more! Have you ever given up something or someone you truly loved because you felt guided along a different path? Would love to hear your stories too!