Love fascinates, frustrates and intrigues me for so many different reasons and yet it still remains one of the things I do most easily.
Over the years I have treated people and love in one of two ways, I let people get close, let them in, love them and get hurt or keep them at arms length, don’t let them in and contrary to what I had hoped still got hurt. I’ve written about the different types of love, I’ve written about those I love, I’ve written about walking away from and losing love and I’ve even written about not letting people in before but last night I had real wake up and smell the coffee moment that finally started to put things into perspective for me.
I finally figured out what the common thread in all this was for me and it was that regardless of whether you let people in or not, it is human nature to place expectations on people and it is when they don’t meet those expectations that you get hurt. Take away the expectations and things don’t hurt as much. But I guess that’s going to need a better explanation so here it is.
I had dinner with a group of friends last night. It was NOT a dinner I was looking forward to, I didn’t want to have to spend my evening with people I no longer connect with and I most certainly didn’t want to spend the evening with one person in particular. I wanted to be with someone else I couldn’t get out of my mind not someone I’d inadvertently been guilted into inviting to dinner because his brother had mentioned that he had told him that he was having dinner with us, a person I was feeling guilty about cutting out my life all because I couldn’t deal with the change in our relationship. I invited him anyway.
You’ll remember him from previous posts in the distant past as someone I referred to as my knight in shining armour. He is someone I had an instant connection with and over the years came to love deeply, yes I’ll even admit that I was madly in love with him for a long time but it all seemed to be very one sided so as much as it hurt I stopped. I moved on or at least I tried to. I went on with my life and went back to not letting people in. I eventually realised I needed people and started letting them in again and started “seeing” other people and then he had a change of heart and wanted more from me, a more that I was no longer able to give, a more that I no longer wanted. I tried staying friendly but it wasn’t long before we went our separate ways. I cut him out of my life because I knew that my other relationships where hurting him and I knew that I couldn’t deal with that or the fact that I no longer loved him. Unfortunately I have remained close to his brother so he has always been a topic that seemed to come up in conversation. This just served to increase my guilt and as all things that make you feel bad about yourself do, I reached that point where I had to decide yesterday whether to accept my guilt and face him or to leave things the way they were. As I said the guilt won and I had to face him.
It was an odd experience. I went in feeling guilty and expecting him to be angry and hurt, mostly because that’s what I was feeling without realising it. There was none of that, we spent the whole evening talking to each other, we even skipped dinner and when he left I felt so much better. After I thought about it I realised that I actually do still love him, just in a totally different way. And the guilt was actually because I was angry and hurt by the way things had happened. I had expected him to love me when I was ready for him to love me and when he didn’t I did what we all do I tried to remove the hurt the only way I thought I could. Instead of accepting it I hid it. Things changed and I moved on and when he was ready to love me I no longer wanted to love him. I was angry that he now wanted what I’d wanted for so long, I was angry that it took other people to make him see it, I was angry that he now expected me to do exactly what I had previously expected him to do and I was hurt that he never put up more of a fight when I cut him out my life.
That is now something I know how to deal with and as I said I do still love him in different way and this time the difference is I know not to expect anything because I have learnt this year that love hurts but it doesn’t hurt as much if you go in with no expectations just patience, kindness, trust, hope and perseverance. That is when love doesn’t fail.
It’s not easy but I’m working on it and yes I am loving, I’m laughing, I’m living again and I’m very definitely learning.
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