Tuesday, June 5, 2012

"You said I wasn't capable of loving you, I never was."

It's starting to settle in that I won't be back in Omaha come fall. In the meantime, I'm filling my void of not seeing any of my friends through Skype, which has been a productive experience. The summer entering our third year of college is a decisively busy and hectic one-- some of us are struggling to keep afloat, others are busy getting ahead. I'm sort of stuck in this weird in-between sort of land, and I haven't begun to reconcile that I probably won't be seeing a lot of my best friends for awhile.

However, I got to Skype with one of my close friends, Linh, today and it was wonderful. I always love talking to her because we end up learning so much about each other, and about ourselves. We ended up talking about dating, and it's interesting to see how far we've both come from our past relationships, and where we think it lies ahead.

I gave Linh some (perhaps) unwarranted advice about her love life-- but I couldn't help it. A lot of her situation was so evocative of what I went through with Andrew that I was terrified for her. Let me preface the following spiel by saying that no matter what happened between Andrew and I, I can never erase the fact that he is my first love. While I no longer feel the same way about him, I am forever grateful for the experiences (despite how painful they were) because I know I deserve better. I know how a man should treat me now, and I know what a real relationship is like. I've moved past that stage in my life.

Listening to her made me map out my previous loves and journey through them, looking at all the mistakes I've made. I think in her situation though, it reminded me most of Andrew and myself. Of course, he and I had a much more intense and awful situation-- but I just hope she never goes through something like that. I thank Andrew for giving me the strength to love myself first, and to finally realize that I deserve more from a man. Dating, much like relationships, is all about the give and take between a person. However, it is difficult for me to give her advice because our love life history is dramatically different. All of her relationships were long, steady and strong. I, on the other hand, have lived and thrived in dysfunctional relationships. My love affairs have always been torrid and temperamental ones. A lot of why she's confused is because she likes someone who obviously isn't willing to put the time and effort into committing to her. My hope and wish for her is that she finds someone who is willing to be the one to reach out towards her and try. It's so hard being the person who puts 100% into pursuing the other, and not getting anything back from the person. Personally, I feel like I have a lot of love to give and I seemed to always get burned in the end.

After around four years, I realize that with Andrew, a lot of it was just playing mind games, and someone who wasn't in it to win it. Being that young, at 15 and 16-- you aren't aware of what you want. Falling in love that young is confusing, and when you fall in love with someone, and they don't feel the same way-- of course it is going to hurt. It was one of those cases: I fell in love with a man who wasn't able to feel the same way. He cared about me, and he even liked me a lot to an extent, but it was known that he wasn't the best at commitment. And who would expect a 16 year old boy to be an expert at it? This bullshit with him lasted until I was around 16 or 17, and he was 18 or 19... it's a lot for adolescents to take in. When you don't have your life figured out, how can you expect to factor someone else in it? It's something that I never realized until now, because I was so blinded by love.

Love makes you do some unbelievably stupid things-- including  he mind games. When someone can't figure out who they are, you can't expect them to be able to know what they want in dating or a relationship. They might have a lot of baggage leftover from their previous relationship, or maybe they're just starting to figure out who they are: in either case, it's a perfectsituation for mind games to develop because no one knows what they want. All one person knows is that they want the other so badly that they're willing to do anything to get them-- even if it means sabotaging other potential love interests. In my case, that's what I did. I reacted to his indecisiveness because I was selfish.

No comments:

Post a Comment