I heard something the other day that I had never really thought about before. Someone mentioned to me that whenever you catch yourself missing someone who left your life, you should remind yourself that them not being part of your present is a choice they make every day. They wake up and decide to maintain the silence. They’re indifferent as to whether the space between you gets larger. And that in itself is pretty powerful closure.
You do not have to be affectionate all the time to care for someone, in fact, caring can also mean a couple of texts or silence for a few days while you both live your lives happily and separately.
People do not care for you less when they’re busy with their own lives. It’s your reaction to them being their own person – and your ability to make yourself happy – that determines how they feel about you.
Not everyone reciprocates to your actions the same way. If you want someone to acknowledge, be interested in, or treat you a certain way for your efforts, all you have to do is let them know. They will try their personal best to accommodate that within their personal spectrum of feelings.
No one owes you 100% of them, not even after 30 years, because someone having a percentage of themselves is what keeps them sane at the end of the day and that’s okay.
A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.
this fucks me up every single time
I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.
After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.
She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.
Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.
The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.
The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.
Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.
I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.
Why are people having so much issue with the article, I agreed with it? The title isn’t the most eloquent thing ever but the article wasn’t encouraging cheating, where you go behind your partners back, but instead looking at the issue of cheating as a not black-and-white thing where there’s one horribly evil person who just wanted to have fun/get laid with one traumatized-for-life victim. Instead, like most- nah, let me say with ANYTHING in real life beyond fiction, the article sees the grays in cheating and why the person cheated in the first place. Not to say that cheating isn’t a horrible thing to do, but I feel like people need to understand that there are reasons people do the things they do. People who cheat are human beings. They could feel horrible about it, they could be trapped in a marriage or relationship that they don’t feel they can escape, they can feel insecure and unloved. Again, not to say it’s something you should ever do, but dehumanizing someone over a mistake is just as bad in my opinion. There’s nowhere where they can talk about their experiences, and it’s likely we know a lot of people who have cheated in our lives even if they haven’t (or were too scared) to tell us about it.
one of the things that bothers me most about posts which imply (or outright state) that all men are inherently abusive, aside from the fact that it’s objectively untrue, is that it normalises and excuses abuse – if abusiveness is inseparable from maleness and masculinity, then abusive men aren’t really accountable for their actions, because by that logic they can’t help it. this also falsely implies that there is no alternative male behaviour, which is incredibly dangerous and absolutely contributes to victim blaming where the perpetrator was a man. men can be gentle! men can be loving! if you’re attracted to men, accept nothing less, and never place the blame on your own attraction to men if you are poorly treated rather than on the man in question for actively choosing to mistreat you.
ifesbob 