I’ve been having a fair number of conversations lately about what it is to be in love with someone who is bad for you. And more poignantly, what is it to still think about them regularly, despite all the shit they put you through.
Quite often, they’re incredible people. They are charming, witty, and of course devilishly handsome. Quirky in all the right ways. Too often, it’s not who they (or you) are, per se, but who you become around each other. This is something I’ve been realizing… just because of the Bad Shit that happened, that I was involved in, it doesn’t mean that I’m A Bad Person. But then do you also have to make the same allowances for them? It’s too easy to demonize someone to legitimize difficult decisions.
I would guess that what we really want is some closure. But with those people, the feelings you have are so intense that you can’t just walk away. Something Drastic has to happen instead. But then you always wonder, it always picks at the back of your brain… what if that hadn’t happened? No matter how established the cycle was, cycles are meant to be broken, right?
I don’t have regrets, only questions.
So this is me baring a bit of my soul. A good friend recently told me that emotions are important things, and I really have been trying to pay attention to mine recently. But that means dusting off so many things I had filed away through logic. Having all this alone time forces introspection, which often hurts more than expected. But it builds character, right? It’s all just back story…
Goodness, that struck a chord with me. I’ve been trying to figure out why who I am in relationships seems so different from who I am normally… I feel like I’m not a Bad Person in general, but put me in a relationship for over 6 months, and I become quite horrible. I think a lot of it has to do with expectations and assumptions and other things that live inside one person’s brain and heart but affect and are affected by the other person. Or I’ve simply never learned how to communicate about what I need in a relationship–you’d think knowing one’s needs and being able to state them would be easy, but for me, it’s not. Either way, once you’ve got more than one person in the equation, it becomes horrendously complicated.
“Or I’ve simply never learned how to communicate about what I need in a relationship”
That’s exactly it. Well, the crux of the problem for most relationships. I don’t know what it is, but I typically open up faster than the woman I have interest in. And then BAM. She shuts down. I’m not trying to place fault with the women, I’m the one who’s attracted to a certain (emotional) type. I need to retrain myself to ‘leave it be’ if they aren’t compatible with me in that manner, no matter how attractive they are. It’s not fair to myself or them in attempting to make things work.
Word. I did the same thing for a long time, I’m just done opening up. No one can betray your trust if you don’t give it in the first place.
or how about don’t open up to anyone who isn’t open to you? wait, am i talking about balance again…
it is my experience (and where heart break is concerned I have MUCH of that) that when you have many questions it’s often that your perception and the reality of the person you’re in Love with … don’t match
so it just doesn’t make sense.
Sometimes bad relationships happen between good people. Unfortunately, when your brain is trying to place blame, these situations can cause problems; so, you may spend some time blaming yourself and some time blaming the other person, but in the end, there’s no clear place to place the blame. Other than for whatever reason, it was a bad match.
Been there, done that, and I hope he’s doing well and is happy, though I know there’s no way it would have turned out that way with us together. Shit was going to happen. I don’t think it would work even years later, as I think we’d have fallen back into the same patterns.
And coming to that realization helped me figure out what I really wanted and valued, which made it easier to recognize and to ask for. If that makes any sense.
I was in a relationship that was bad for me for a few years. It did take Something Drastic to break the cycle. We should talk.
that we should. I’d love to grab coffee sometime. I’m gone until the 26th, but maybe after that?
Just got back in town myself. I’m crazy busy for the next couple weeks tho… How does April 9th or 10th work for you?
i certainly adore your point about forgiving in others what you would have excused in yourself. it is simply a continuation of do unto others, which is a sentiment all the major religions share. a postulate of sociology, perhaps the foundation of civilization, even. but to forgive becomes a spiritual experience, for me, as u see urself in someone else, to love them enough to forgive them. this, of course, doesn’t mean u can now be around them. relationships need balance, even if it is the balance of opposites or the balance of two people desperately in love. so often the simple fact is our visions, our model of what we want is incompatible to our partner’s. please read prometheus rising, the idea of a logical person not having access to that model of how the mind works on the different levels, emotional being the 2nd of 8 in this model, is torturous. i was a psychology major for 2 years and have read freud and nietzsche but this is better information that the lot of that put together. if u don’t like my link, get the book by hook or by crook!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2842/Robert-Anton-Wilsons-Prometheus-Rising
<3
Questions = Progress/Communication/Future. Regrets = Waste of time/Regression. Good choice.
I think that it’s really easy to become overwhelmed by re-occurring thoughts of people of our past, but it’s so natural. It’s not that we’re necessarily still in love with them, (If we ever truly were) but that they have had a(n) (Potentially profound) effect on our lives, for good or ill, and we’ve grown and changed because of them. Whether that was their intention or not. And after Drastic Measures are lost in the past, we can look back and actually see how we’ve changed since those days, and how our opinions of Said Person/People have mutated and matured as well. Reiteration; after enough time, regrets are worthless. Questions will always exist, and we will continue to grow because of them.
Someone told me recently that a big part of love/relationships, for them, is to like who they become or are around their lover/friend, and that really stuck with me. To be so self-aware is difficult sometimes, especially within the contexts of a new relationship, but it’s important to realize when you might be suppressing certain aspects of your personality around someone, or what new person within you they could be bringing out, and how that is changing you.
On a different note, you realize that you are arriving in Bloomington a mere two days after I leave town???
*tear*
I’m so borrowing the first and second paragraph and posting it to my journal. I really hope you don’t mind because it’s very well written and like I say in my post, it resonates well with where I am right now relationship-wise.