A woman I used to live with years ago and who finally to my relief left me used to criticize me for the unending love I still had for people who I had loved before her, long before our relationship.
She left then months later told me she had made a terrible mistake and wanted to come back. I replied that I would never have done the same thing that she had because I always feel a loyalty to people especially to a lover but now I was in love with someone else
, I had met an Italian and was deeply in love with her , not just love I was obssessed with her, my every moment was her and I could not understand why her every waking moment was me, I even thought she must be mad.
But before her me and my English girlfriend were unmarried and lived in her house in the East End of London and she was very rich.
We lived in the poor East End because she wanted to taste the poverty of the poor. She was 20 and I was 21. After me she lived out the rest of her life with a man who was boring in the extreme but who cared very much for her, these were her words.
Years later when we met in the Arsenal underground near where I live in London. She recriminated about what I was supposed to have done (I didnt actually do anything) and was penitent about a life thrown away with a man she had not loved and could not love apart from brotherly love according to her.
She had had a child and loved the child but did not love the Father apart from mutual respect and care. She said "I have to love him because he is the Father of my child" . Obviously nothing is as meaningless as that .
At that point I had gone past caring about her in a passionate lovers way but I agreed to meet her again in a pub because once we had been together and once we had loved.She told me about her boring life with the academic she had married and it was sad to see someone who felt they had thrown their life away. She was still with her husband but I got the feeling that it was a kind of seperation although they still shared a bed together. The sex it seemed was something that they managed to get through every now and then. She said to me that being with her man was more lonely than being single.I went through the motions of saying stuff like well I am sorry bla bla bla.
But I was sad that she hated me because I had not saved her life as she thought I could have done . One of her laments to me was "You are and were a bastard but fun", I understood that perfectly because I live for fun and her academic husband seemingly was a total bore after the false veneer of intellectualism had worn off after the first few months of marraige. "Why the fuck did you leave me and get with that moron " I asked .She replied that she wanted to live normally for once .But now she wished she had never done what she did. She continued "I am only waiting for the kid to become a teenager then I am leaving him".
The statistics suggest , supposedly, that people are content with being single, meaning they may genuinely prefer to live on their own rather than choosing to live with a person who they cannot really love. If true, I do not find that fascinating. Also, I find it easy to understand because I’m not a person who likes to live alone, but I can imagine being interdependent with someone you cannot love..
I wonder if modern life is so easy and convenient in general that when people are faced with the regular difficulty of being considerate with and anticipating and meeting the daily needs of a significant other who they do not love they just go on with it : Do many people just prefer to focus on themselves and consider the inopportune other half as being merely someone who pays the bills or half of them? Is that so much easier than a real love ? This is not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer.
One of the best pieces of advice I received as a young person was this: Don’t look to find Mrs. Right; rather, work to become the right person. And I still think that is very good advice.
Adding to that line of thinking: As you already know, we never get to choose who chooses to love us.
I don’t know the reasons why the woman above left me although I was glad she did (that someone I had just met was not only the most beautiful woman Id ever seen anywhere including any movie star but also one of the kindest people too). One day my english girlfriend just said I've met someone and she left, I did not make a fuss as I am one of those people who suffer in silence but in that moment I was wondering what I had done to be left.She told me reasons , I was too sexual and she was not, she was not too much into things that I liked, she was not interested in football ,I was too working class etc etc etc. Some of the reasons were true, some were not.But at that point I could not care any more.I was focused on my new love. But in recent years I have often wondered one thing about my old loves like the above woman
Is it better to love or to be loved?
Would you personally rather be defined by who you loved or who loved you in return?
But here’s an additive idea I’m getting to: Part of the reason I never stopped being loyal and never stopped loving the women in my past is that even though they fall from my mind maybe for years, in time they come back again and you often wonder what they are doing and how they are getting on,you already know many of the answers, you know that they won't be very happy, you know that they will have put all their energy into the child they had with the person they couldnt love, and you know that the beauty that attracted you once will have faded away, if the years passed are long enough.
But there is one true thing: I perceived that regardless of how good a person you are, how hard you try, how skilled you are, how successfully you maintain your weight, charm, and appearance: You still never get to choose who continues to love you.
And so part of the reason I’ve never stopped loving people in my past (as if I could choose to turn love on or off) is: Choosing to continue loving them was the best solution I could think of when faced with keeping faith with all the good times we had, cooking together, dancing together, walking home from midnight movies at 3 in the morning then sharing a single bed together.All those things.
From my limited observations, I think many people respond to breakups and heart-achet in different ways. Many demonize the person who left them, or the person they fell out of love with, or the person that bored them or the person who was no longer their most interesting social option, and they burn the bridges behind them.
I don’t know why it appears to be so common in the human psyche that people prefer to mischaracterize and paint the people who left them in negative lights.
Other people, like Hamlet, when faced with so much pain, sincerely debate whether any kind of “end” may be superior to the pain of continuing to love or continuing to remember the truths of their past love.
Part of the reason I’ve never stopped loving people from my past is: I think as individuals, sometimes the best we can do is to open our arms . . . and leave them open . . . sometimes even long after someone has left us. Because again, we don’t get to choose who wants to stay, and sometimes the best we may be able to do is love those few or the one who choose to remain.
Returning to the original idea these thoughts are built from: My social pursuits have not been to find the one person who I will adore and who will enjoy staying with me forever. My pursuit has not been to find “the one and only.” Rather, I choose to be someone who loves . . . who chooses to keep loving.
I could not determine who would continue to love me. But I could choose to keep loving the few who chose me. Does that make sense?
The better question is not as Hamlet framed it: If things don’t go your way, the options should not jump to: Do I continue to exist or to not exist? Now that my life with “him or her” is over, do I continue to go on? Do I have to kill the past love to genuinely love someone new? No, I don’t think so. That has not been my experience.
Rather, when things don’t go your way: (and they will often not go your way): Sometimes you continue loving in the direction of your unending failures – because that is a more courageous and noble choice than either killing yourself or killing a beautiful part of the experiences and relationships that formed you. Sometimes it may be okay to choose to continue loving a person, even long after your love is not returned, because that is who you are, you are a person who chooses to love. You’re not defined by “who loves you.” You are defined by who you choose to love.
I don’t know magic. And I may be below average in social aptitudes. I don’t write articles with titles like “How To Gain The Affection Of Any Person You Choose.” Maybe there are other people who can teach you those things, but I don’t know those things.
The best I know to do, the best I can to suggest to you, is what I do: I can demonstrate how to keep arms open and to love well enough that the odds are you will still receive affections in return beyond what you deserve.
I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you how to get her or him back: the one, or the several, who got away. But I don’t know how to do that.
I don’t know magic. But I know how I love, how I choose to keep loving, how I don’t lie to myself.
She left then months later told me she had made a terrible mistake and wanted to come back. I replied that I would never have done the same thing that she had because I always feel a loyalty to people especially to a lover but now I was in love with someone else
, I had met an Italian and was deeply in love with her , not just love I was obssessed with her, my every moment was her and I could not understand why her every waking moment was me, I even thought she must be mad.
But before her me and my English girlfriend were unmarried and lived in her house in the East End of London and she was very rich.
We lived in the poor East End because she wanted to taste the poverty of the poor. She was 20 and I was 21. After me she lived out the rest of her life with a man who was boring in the extreme but who cared very much for her, these were her words.
Years later when we met in the Arsenal underground near where I live in London. She recriminated about what I was supposed to have done (I didnt actually do anything) and was penitent about a life thrown away with a man she had not loved and could not love apart from brotherly love according to her.
She had had a child and loved the child but did not love the Father apart from mutual respect and care. She said "I have to love him because he is the Father of my child" . Obviously nothing is as meaningless as that .
At that point I had gone past caring about her in a passionate lovers way but I agreed to meet her again in a pub because once we had been together and once we had loved.She told me about her boring life with the academic she had married and it was sad to see someone who felt they had thrown their life away. She was still with her husband but I got the feeling that it was a kind of seperation although they still shared a bed together. The sex it seemed was something that they managed to get through every now and then. She said to me that being with her man was more lonely than being single.I went through the motions of saying stuff like well I am sorry bla bla bla.
But I was sad that she hated me because I had not saved her life as she thought I could have done . One of her laments to me was "You are and were a bastard but fun", I understood that perfectly because I live for fun and her academic husband seemingly was a total bore after the false veneer of intellectualism had worn off after the first few months of marraige. "Why the fuck did you leave me and get with that moron " I asked .She replied that she wanted to live normally for once .But now she wished she had never done what she did. She continued "I am only waiting for the kid to become a teenager then I am leaving him".
The statistics suggest , supposedly, that people are content with being single, meaning they may genuinely prefer to live on their own rather than choosing to live with a person who they cannot really love. If true, I do not find that fascinating. Also, I find it easy to understand because I’m not a person who likes to live alone, but I can imagine being interdependent with someone you cannot love..
I wonder if modern life is so easy and convenient in general that when people are faced with the regular difficulty of being considerate with and anticipating and meeting the daily needs of a significant other who they do not love they just go on with it : Do many people just prefer to focus on themselves and consider the inopportune other half as being merely someone who pays the bills or half of them? Is that so much easier than a real love ? This is not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer.
One of the best pieces of advice I received as a young person was this: Don’t look to find Mrs. Right; rather, work to become the right person. And I still think that is very good advice.
Adding to that line of thinking: As you already know, we never get to choose who chooses to love us.
I don’t know the reasons why the woman above left me although I was glad she did (that someone I had just met was not only the most beautiful woman Id ever seen anywhere including any movie star but also one of the kindest people too). One day my english girlfriend just said I've met someone and she left, I did not make a fuss as I am one of those people who suffer in silence but in that moment I was wondering what I had done to be left.She told me reasons , I was too sexual and she was not, she was not too much into things that I liked, she was not interested in football ,I was too working class etc etc etc. Some of the reasons were true, some were not.But at that point I could not care any more.I was focused on my new love. But in recent years I have often wondered one thing about my old loves like the above woman
Is it better to love or to be loved?
Would you personally rather be defined by who you loved or who loved you in return?
But here’s an additive idea I’m getting to: Part of the reason I never stopped being loyal and never stopped loving the women in my past is that even though they fall from my mind maybe for years, in time they come back again and you often wonder what they are doing and how they are getting on,you already know many of the answers, you know that they won't be very happy, you know that they will have put all their energy into the child they had with the person they couldnt love, and you know that the beauty that attracted you once will have faded away, if the years passed are long enough.
But there is one true thing: I perceived that regardless of how good a person you are, how hard you try, how skilled you are, how successfully you maintain your weight, charm, and appearance: You still never get to choose who continues to love you.
And so part of the reason I’ve never stopped loving people in my past (as if I could choose to turn love on or off) is: Choosing to continue loving them was the best solution I could think of when faced with keeping faith with all the good times we had, cooking together, dancing together, walking home from midnight movies at 3 in the morning then sharing a single bed together.All those things.
From my limited observations, I think many people respond to breakups and heart-achet in different ways. Many demonize the person who left them, or the person they fell out of love with, or the person that bored them or the person who was no longer their most interesting social option, and they burn the bridges behind them.
I don’t know why it appears to be so common in the human psyche that people prefer to mischaracterize and paint the people who left them in negative lights.
Other people, like Hamlet, when faced with so much pain, sincerely debate whether any kind of “end” may be superior to the pain of continuing to love or continuing to remember the truths of their past love.
Part of the reason I’ve never stopped loving people from my past is: I think as individuals, sometimes the best we can do is to open our arms . . . and leave them open . . . sometimes even long after someone has left us. Because again, we don’t get to choose who wants to stay, and sometimes the best we may be able to do is love those few or the one who choose to remain.
Returning to the original idea these thoughts are built from: My social pursuits have not been to find the one person who I will adore and who will enjoy staying with me forever. My pursuit has not been to find “the one and only.” Rather, I choose to be someone who loves . . . who chooses to keep loving.
I could not determine who would continue to love me. But I could choose to keep loving the few who chose me. Does that make sense?
The better question is not as Hamlet framed it: If things don’t go your way, the options should not jump to: Do I continue to exist or to not exist? Now that my life with “him or her” is over, do I continue to go on? Do I have to kill the past love to genuinely love someone new? No, I don’t think so. That has not been my experience.
Rather, when things don’t go your way: (and they will often not go your way): Sometimes you continue loving in the direction of your unending failures – because that is a more courageous and noble choice than either killing yourself or killing a beautiful part of the experiences and relationships that formed you. Sometimes it may be okay to choose to continue loving a person, even long after your love is not returned, because that is who you are, you are a person who chooses to love. You’re not defined by “who loves you.” You are defined by who you choose to love.
I don’t know magic. And I may be below average in social aptitudes. I don’t write articles with titles like “How To Gain The Affection Of Any Person You Choose.” Maybe there are other people who can teach you those things, but I don’t know those things.
The best I know to do, the best I can to suggest to you, is what I do: I can demonstrate how to keep arms open and to love well enough that the odds are you will still receive affections in return beyond what you deserve.
I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you how to get her or him back: the one, or the several, who got away. But I don’t know how to do that.
I don’t know magic. But I know how I love, how I choose to keep loving, how I don’t lie to myself.
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