On this Valentine's Day Eve, I find myself thinking about love and loss and a whole bunch of other crap that I would rather not think about. This is the other thing that I dislike about this holiday, you can't get away from it. It is everywhere: love and sex and all that stuff is in your face. However, I have recently learned that painful stuff in your face is good news. I can look at it, examine it and perhaps, move through it. So here we go:
How is it that my heart is still breaking? It has been 14 months since we have been together and two years since we were really together. We were only a couple for a year and even that year was punctuated with a lot of hard feelings and brief episodes of separateness.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I do not want to love him anymore. I do not really even want him back. But I would kill for one more Sunday morning where we lay in bed, entangled, talking, drinking coffee and holding each other. It is as if I was never held before him. That time that we spent together changed me in some fundamental way and now I can’t move on. It is like every fiber of my being is addicted to that feeling I used to get from him on those lazy Sunday mornings. I never had it before him, and I fear that I will never have it again.
Why can’t I really let him go? I mean Sunday mornings in bed are nice but they are not worth torturing yourself for years...
I have no idea which is why I am writing this. Writing seems to be the way my psyche works shit out. The thoughts, feelings and emotions have to be pushed from my heart, to my head then down through my arms to my fingers where they appear in tiny character form that you can read. It is like my inner world leaves tiny alphabetic evidence of the fact that I care, I feel, I love.
I think the part that is hard to let go is that I believed in him. I loved him. Even the parts that were annoying or hard or drove me nuts. There weren’t a lot of those: the fact that he would not spend the day with me and the kids and would need to disappear, that he flat out refused to take a family vacation and his hyper controlling nature around money and spending. Now those might seem like some pretty big issues but mostly I felt compassion for him. His inability to be with us all day long was because he was wounded and just emotionally couldn’t take it and I could see that and I forgave him that. The inability to take a family vacation was just another version of what kept him apart on the weekends. The money issue was a direct result of his shame for overspending throughout the years and a strong commitment to not do that in the future. I commended him on this and wanted his assistance to help me do something similar. So, no even the things that drove me crazy, didn’t end us. I loved all of him: the quirky, annoying and even the hurtful parts because I knew where they came from. He is the only man that in the middle of a heated argument that I just wanted to walk over and hold. I am not that person (ask anyone) and I did not ever feel that way before him.
We are apart because he left. Not for some other woman. But because he couldn’t be with me. I am not even sure that I understand it so explaining it to you is near impossible. Best I can get to is that even though he loved me, it wasn’t enough for him to commit to. So the most amazing love of my life didn’t love me enough to stay.
I vacillate between pathetic and despondent when I think about this. How can someone I loved so much: I loved his kids, his body, mind and spirit. How can I have loved someone so completely and been so wrong about how he felt about me? It is a riddle that I can’t solve so I just keep trying over and over and over again which might explain why I am sitting here two years since we officially broke up still in love with someone that doesn’t want me.
Whatever his reasons, whatever his issues - the only one that matters is that he left. He broke up with me over a phone call. One year down the drain and I didn’t even matter enough to do it in person. At least I didn’t get a text...
There was a time last summer when he needed my help with a family issue - we rekindled the friendship part - I helped him with his matter - we told each other how much we still loved each other - I broke it off with the guy that I was seeing because it wasn’t fair to be in love with him and seeing someone else. And what do you think happened? Yep, he left me again. This time not even a phone call. The love of my life ghosted me - just stopped calling or texting or anything.
So he used me for my assistance, and I think I even knew it at the time but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be back in his life. I wanted to help and be there and be someone he leaned on. In the end, he got what he wanted and then he left again. I did get to continue my relationship with his daughter so at least there is that. But that is super painful for me. I love her and enjoy every single moment I get to spend with her but it hurts being so close to him and not being able to be with him. I wouldn't change it, I love that kid, I love both of his kids and would walk through any amount of pain for either of them.
So how did I become this pathetic loser that loves someone that uses her and then leaves her without so much as a goodbye?
I am still trying to sort that out - which is why I think my heart continues to break over and over and over again. I have to keep reliving this most fundamental and basic betrayal. I keep calling something less than love, love. Nothing he has done for the past two years is loving. Yet I continue to believe that he loved me. I continue to give him credit for loving me when in truth he never let me in and always had one foot out the door.
Upon further analysis: maybe he didn’t love me. He wanted me, he loved being with me, he needed me. There were lots of things that he wanted and gave to me but maybe love was not one of them. Funny, I thought heartbreak was the result of love - truth is that heartbreak is the result of not getting what you want. Love may or may not be a factor.
My heart continues to break because I continue to believe that he was THE ONE. I continue to insist that he was the guy for me. Reality check: Maybe he was just another guy that was full of disappointment. He just ends up at the front of a very long line of men that have stepped up and then stepped back. My continual and ongoing issue is that I believe that them stepping up means more than it actually does. I believe their words and completely miss that their actions show a different agenda all together.
Hard truth: it isn’t and hasn’t ever been about the men. They are varied in their affect, effect and situations. The reason that they all are standing in the same line of discarded and distanced lovers is because they all let me down, repeatedly. Some I realized were not up to the task early and I jettisoned them quickly, some lasted longer before I sent them to the back of the line. A few saw the line and got the cue before I was ready for them to go...not many but a few. He was the only one that I didn’t want to go and in that feeling, I allowed myself to become shielded from the truth: he was never really here to begin with and he was not ever up to the task of loving me and being there for me.
I have the long line of jilted lovers because I have always left. I left my marriage. I left my fiancé. I left pretty much everyone...sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly but always, I left.
What a shocker for me to realize on this rainy depressing Saturday morning that I am the reason that my heart continues to break, repeatedly. It is me. Not him. Not the many men that came before. Me. I have entered every relationship that I have ever had with this expectation that this one person might love me enough for me to stay. Truth is that is a quality one possess regardless of the person with whom you are having a relationship. This deep seated need that I have had to be loved is what caused me to have the revolving love door in my life in the first place. Is it you? Nope! Ok, you? Nope. You? For decades...
I have allowed this deep wound to be the reason that I keep bringing these men into my life and it is this very same wound that causes me to grant a full access pass in the beginning -knowing full well that the pass will be revoked in short order. I listen to what I say and what they say and I completely fail to see the action of either party. It isn’t about the words - it is about the action. That is where every relationship that I have ever had has failed. I am not up for the action and neither are they.
My heart continues to break because I keep thinking that the answer to my wound is him coming back. Then I would be redeemed and he might love me the way that I need to be loved and then I will be ok. Truth is that it doesn’t matter if he comes back - my heart keeps breaking because I think that he holds the answer. He was never had the answer because I was asking the wrong person the question. He was just another guy that attempted to be the one. Apparently the vacuous need that I project is so awesome that even one that started off as promising as him, had to back away.
I think that I have to deal with this need but I have no idea how. All I want is to love someone and have them love me back. That is all that I have ever wanted. How do I heal a wound that seems to require someone to love me in order to heal? How the fuck do I do this on my own when the only real resolution seems to be finding someone else to satiate the need?
I keep breaking my own heart by my insistence that I be seen and loved by another. I keep signing up for the heartbreak because that is what feels is required in order to get the need met. If I quit, I feel like I am quitting life and meaning and hope. I feel like to quit is to die. However, perhaps that is exactly what needs to happen. Perhaps I do need to die a little....I think we call that surrender.
Perhaps I can try to surrender the idea that any man is ever going to love me. Perhaps that is not in my cards. Perhaps I am not destined for a great love story. Perhaps my destiny is to sit outside that particular circle and write about it. Perhaps, my lesson is stop thinking that I deserve a great love. Perhaps, I should be more concerned with being a great love. I was to Him. I loved him even though he left me, even though he was not there for me, even though he seemed not to really care. I did and do love him. Perhaps that is what love is all about - loving even when the circumstances show that it is a bad deal for you. Perhaps it is never about the love we receive...only about the love we give. Because I know that I grew as a person in my loving Him. I can look back at my behavior and see that perhaps I loved him more than me. I continued to sign up continually to love him even when he continued to give me less and less. What I got back did not dictate what I gave him. I still gave to him even though I got less and less in return. And I would still do it for him. Whatever he needed, I would give to him.
Maybe heartbreak is just love becoming unbound from its object. Me not being able to give to him is what makes this so painful. Because my love for him is no longer really attached to him, just this idea of him that is wholly fabricated in my mind.
Perhaps my most recent lesson in love is that it is easy to love someone when they love you back. It is much harder to love when they don’t. My life loving him has been about giving, over and over and over again. Being constantly and continually heartbroken over the fact that he remains gone from my life, just causes my heart to be opened further every time. He is a kind of love crowbar that keeps being used to pry open my scarred and locked up heart.
I can see my growth in my love for him. I haven’t seen him in months but I love him just as much right now as I did when I met him and he wanted to be with me. In fact, I love him more. I have also learned to love this broken women with her pathetic yearnings, desperate need to be seen, loved and been able to cradle her with loving kindness as she meanders her way through this morass of longing, pain and need.
Perhaps some will see my love for him as a pathetic: an empty attempt to love...but to those I would say, really? Oh it is easy to love someone who does all the right things and shows up for you and loves you back. Much harder to love the one that doesn’t. The end result isn’t what it is really all about: that loving is the path, the point and the reason that living is worthwhile. Loving him has made me better and gave me a way to know myself
that I was not able to before him. It has given me a lot of rich and fertile ground to hate myself and him. But I have been able to sow the seeds of loss, pity and despair into love for us both. It doesn’t even matter whether he ever loved me or not. I love him and through loving him I have come to love myself more deeply and better and in a new way. I am just going to keep sending love to him whether he wants it or not. For him, there will always be one person on this earth that loves him despite his failings and the fact that he doesn’t love me back. I love him anyway. I fucking love him anyway. And that is my lesson: love anyway. He did not break my heart, I did. I think that is what is all about: I have to be brave enough to break my own heart...continually. I have to love me, anyway.
