It's a big deal, isn't it? Giving the promise of spending the rest of your life with someone, and then completely breaking that promise only weeks before you are due to say your vows. Yeah...that's what I did.

But to be perfectly honest, I learned many valuable lessons in being engaged and in calling off not only the wedding but the entire relationship. It was everything I'd ever wanted, then, it was terrifying and eventually, it became suffocatingly and heartbreakingly impossible.

1. I learned to get to know who I was committing to.

We started dating in May, said "I love you" in June, looked at rings in July and he proposed in September. Our wedding was scheduled for that December. With that kind of timeline, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that we moved extremely fast. Why? Because at first, it felt right. We got caught up in our feelings and never really thought past our immediate emotions.

I learned that dating is a good thing. That even though I can get impatient and impulsive in giving into my immediate emotions, it is also important for me to allow my relationship to grow at its own pace in a way that I can get to know my partner. I know that I tend to follow my feelings without hesitation and now I know to be more careful when doing so.

I need to give myself enough time to see my partner's different sides before just trusting it would work out based on sparks and how we got along in the honeymoon phase. I need to see all the qualities of someone and then determine if I want to stay long term. Marriage isn't a warm and fuzzy idea anymore, it's a serious change that affects my entire life, and I'm not sure I was really aware of that then.

2. I learned how important it is to be sober together.

Don't get me wrong, I love going out with my favorite people. But when you start dating someone and all you do is go out or party with them, it can be hard to really get to know who you are dating. We weren't the truest versions of ourselves and that made it pretty difficult to build a relationship. Our emotions were more intense, we were more carefree and our conversations weren't ones we could count on. Now, I realize it's important to spend quality time together in order to create a future.

3. I learned not to be so naive.

Something that has always stayed in the back of my mind is the words of his old roommate. He said to me after my ex and I took our first trip together that "relationships that start fast scare me. They tend to crash and burn out." Then, I was confident that wasn't us. I wanted to prove him wrong. But now, I understand what he was saying in a way I was ignorant to before.

I think marriage is something different to everyone. I know people who, after 20 years, get divorced. I know couples who got married after 3 months, raised a family and are still happily together. I don't think there is any single timeline that is required for marriage to be "right".

But I also learned not to be so trusting. I fell in love in a way I had never felt before. I felt it everywhere. But that didn't mean we had everything that made us compatible to live a lifetime together.

I ignored the little things that eventually became big enough to tear us apart. I trusted that as long as we were crazy about each other we would be okay and we could make a marriage work.

But the thing about sharing a life with someone is this- you aren't always crazy over one another. Hell, sometimes you don't even like each other. You need things like respect and understanding to fall back on, and that wasn't something we spent a lot of time investing in.

4. I learned to let go.

I've always been the perfectionist type. I had my life planned out in great detail, and I clung to a plan so much that when I finally got everything I wanted, I was devasted it didn't bring me the kind of happiness I had been searching for. I learned that people can not fix you, nor can they fix your problems.

I had to let go of this idea that the love of your life comes along and suddenly the wounds you carry are healed. My flaws, my pain, and my shortcoming are all my own, and I am the only one who has power over them. I had to learn to invest in myself and not depend on someone else to fix the things that hurt me.

I had to learn to re-plan my life, with myself at the center. I lost my safety net, my comfort and my stability, which taught me to stand on my own and pushed me to rebuild my life in a way that made me much stronger and self-reliant emotionally. I learned that sometimes life isn't what you plan it to be, and that's okay. Starting over is okay.

5. I learned about forgiveness.

Sometimes, when we hurt people, they don't forgive us. And I can understand that now. I might not like it, but I understand it. There were shortcomings on his part that meant the world to me, and I feel like today I can chalk it up to him just not having some of the things that were important to me.

There were things in our relationship that he couldn't handle, and as much as it hurt me at the time, I forgive him for it and I understand that he was better in some areas than others. I could've driven myself crazy but I chose to accept that what's happened has happened and all I can do is carry my lessons I've learned into my future.

Obviously, when you plan to marry someone, calling off the wedding isn't something you anticipate, and it hurt him pretty badly. How I went about it and how I behaved afterward is something he couldn't forgive me for.

And that's okay. Because if he had, I would have jumped right back into the relationship I knew I couldn't make last a lifetime. And now, I can come to terms with our journey, and be thankful for what it taught me, both the good and the bad and all the emotions that came with it.