Sometimes when we want something so much, we just want it to work out and we hope for the best, we’re blind to the fact that maybe, just maybe it’s not even right in the first place.
Like when a relationship is over and you’re stupid enough to keep an illicit affair going for an entire year afterwards. You’ve given up your status as the most important person in his life, you’ve given up the hand holding and the stolen kisses, you’ve given up the ‘I love you’ for cheap ‘I want you’ instead.
Sounds ridiculous no?
But it happens; women all over the world (and some closer to home) can’t let him go. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just far too painful to bear, so you stop minding that every day you used to see him turns to every 2 weeks, and even then it’s only for a few hours.
In some ways, it’s a blindfold to the harsh realities of life. Moving on can sound like such a hideous set of words. This arrangement makes you feel like you’re slowly letting go, easing yourself into life without him, taking it one step at a time, seeing him less and less, to a point that one day you’ll be indifferent to the fact that he’s not there. Right?
Wrong. Really you’re making it worse for yourself. Not even in the sense that your friends will tell you about ‘not being able to move on’. In reality it’s far worse. It’s an insult. Firstly to yourself, for settling for a shadow of what it was, even though you’re worth far more. More importantly it’s an insult to what you had. If you’d have just left it after you’d broken up, there’d still be the anger, pain and passion. But at least that’s something.
Carrying on with the casual meetings is like watching a once raging campfire slowly and painfully die out until all you’re left watching is a pile of wet logs, shivering as you think about what went wrong.
But it’s not something you’ll want to believe or hear. It’s something that in time we can’t help but to learn. A whole year. That’s how long it took me, but even the most patient person can’t go on forever. There will be a limit that you reach, a moment when something inside you screams Enough. And that is when the calm will settle, when you know you can’t handle another disappointment and understand that you shouldn’t have to. But it’s also when a tiny little part of you dies, for me it’s that hope of a fairy-tale ending, for you maybe something else.
Yes it hurts, but after the amount of time it’s been, it’s only a dull pain as opposed to the sharp angst you always used to feel. It’s a pain for how it should have been not for what it was.
You can give and give and give until there’s nothing left to offer, but if he just takes and takes and takes, isn’t that how you end up empty?
