Unrequited Love And Why I Deserve Better

Love, or rather unrequited love.  That's the stuff of which tragedies are made.  It's a hopeless situation when you're in love with someone and they do not return that love.  It's a self-inflicted, soul destroying, torture of epic proportions, that can have only one possible outcome.  And as if this were not enough, the path of unrequited love is fraught with the very serious danger of losing yourself entirely in a one-sided love affair that will consume you and that will devour your own soul, utterly.  It is a path that will eventually, not only break your heart, but destroy your heart entirely.  Trust me, I've been there, I know.

Why would someone put them self through this?  After all, unrequited love is a truly masochistic pastime.  It defies sound reasoning and is devoid of any semblance of logic.  One would have to be mad to do such a thing, wouldn't they?  The answer is of course, that love is not formed in the head, it is created with the heart.  With anything that is of the heart, it in tinged with a touch of madness.  The heart doesn't listen to reason, sound judgement and logic.  The heart flies free on a whim, it grasps hold of dreams and it speaks of love.  And love, once it has you in its clutches, is a very hard beast to escape.  The heart acts of its own free will, it does as it pleases, and if you allow it, it will lead you, or rather, it will pull you along at breakneck speed, right on down the path of love.  Once it begins, it becomes an unstoppable force, propelling you further and deeper, ever on, and like the light from a black hole, it is not possible to fight, nor flee the pull of its gravity.

In my own life, I have suffered greatly in the pursuit of what I believed at the time to have been love.  Of course, it could never have been true love, since the feelings were only on my side, a constant stream of one way love, projected outwards and very little of anything received in return.  All I ever did was to bang my head against the proverbial brick wall.  There was no way through, no matter how hard I tried.  The perverseness of the situation was that the more resistance I met, the harder I pushed and the more determined I became to succeed.  Something propelled me forward, it drove me ever on, in the process I took many knocks on the chin, but I just kept jumping right back in there.  My perseverance was surely going to pay off, my demonstration of my commitment and determination would succeed, after all, what woman doesn't want a man who will fight for her love tooth and nail? 

How did I ever get myself into these situations, and more importantly, why would I allow this to happen?  Yes, that is deliberately plural, for I have found myself in these situations on several occasions.  Each time I said it would be different, I would succeed, that I had learned the lessons of my previous failures.  I was wrong.  Even when I did not want to become involved, even when I understood clearly that the situation would be toxic to me, some how, at a certain point in time, I discovered that it was already too late - I was caught, unbeknown to me, my heart had secretly been at work.

I have never found love easy to come by.  I've spent long periods of time without even a hint of a romantic encounter.  It's was never that I was not looking, I always was, but opportunities were few and far between.  I lived my life with the constant feeling of being unlovable, I viewed myself as unattractive, and I had a shyness around women, a feeling that they would never find me remotely interesting.  Words would catch in my throat, nothing would come out.  If opportunities had been there, I never saw them because I could never believe someone would be interested in me.  This is exactly why, when someone did show me just a hint of interest, I jumped at it and seized upon it, grasping on and holding tight, even if that meant that the situation was far from ideal.  When one of these women told me that they had a barrier to letting someone in, a barrier to love because of the hurt caused by a previous relationship, or that they already had a boyfriend, I told myself that I just needed to be patient, that eventually they would see the qualities I could offer, that I was the right person for them and eventually they would see it too.

Looking back, I suppose I could view these situations as a form of teasing.  I was being given just enough attention to keep me interested, but never being given anything close to anything truly meaningful.  I was dangling on a thread and they were toying with me.  And like an idiot, I stayed there and let them do it.  It was wholly unfair of these women to do that to me, but perhaps they did not know, nor did they understand my vulnerabilities.  How could they have known, since I never showed them, and I did not know them myself.  Each one of these women must have seen something in me, each must have wanted something, needed some emotional connection that was lacking in their current life and relationship, if they were having one.  I became the person that would fill that void for them, perhaps even to reaffirm that the person they were with was right for them, to get them through a sticky patch.  It just occurred to me that I had a complete lack of respect and sense of dignity for myself.  This was all I believed I was worth.  No.  This is all the love that I believed I was worth.

Each time one of these situations arose, I invested great amounts of time and effort, giving up my own life in the process, and sacrificing time with friends and family in the pursuit of this conquest.  All my thoughts were bent on it.  The longer that the situation persisted, the more it would slowly and inevitably consume me, until I was utterly lost in it.  I firmly believed that eventually my love and the attention that I was giving would break down any resistance to me, that I would over come the barrier to mutual love.  I imagined it to be like water slowly eroding away rock until given enough time, the rock wears away, the dam breaks, and the water flows free.  Of course, I was wrong.  At some juncture, out of a huge frustration and desperation, I would push as hard as I could and I would bring everything to a head.  I could take it no more, it was win or bust. And bust it was every time, and I was inevitably left alone, nursing my broken heart once more.

There is perhaps another reason why I let these situations occur in my life and it was only last year that I finally uncovered this truth: I have always felt that I was undeserving of love.  With this knowledge, I have been able to clearly see where I have gone wrong throughout my life.  It makes it abundantly clear to me why I pursued and persisted in these situations that were extremely damaging to me and that never had a chance of working out.  I felt I was wholly unworthy of being loved in the right way, the true way, and so I immersed myself in a toxic and negative kind of love, because that was the kind that I believed myself to be deserving.  My life has been an endless pursuit of love in one form or another and I am sure that this is also a contributing factor to why I settled for something less than perfect.  I just needed something, anything, just some form of attention and to know that I was wanted - something for which I have been bereft my entire life.  When I think about it now, I rue the time that I lost in these situations, time that I could have spent with someone who actually accepted me for the person that I am and who would give their love freely to me.  I might have met them, if I had not been so completely and hopelessly caught up in the wrong kind of love with someone who did not truly want me.  I have been such a fool, but I cannot regret my actions, since they brought me to here and to now, and to the person that I have become.

And here I am.  Finally I understand all of this.  I know now why I did these things, why I put myself through such torture and torment.  I have learned to love myself, to forgive myself and perhaps more importantly, to accept myself.  I am at last at the place where I needed to be in order to discover the right kind of love, the kind of love for which I am deserving.  I will never allow myself to go down the road of unrequited love again.  I will never be tricked into following that path.  For I am worthy of being loved and if you do not see that, then you have no place in my life.  Do not waste my time. Don't even try it.  Unrequited love is the path of doom, and I for one, am done with that path forever.  I know that somewhere out there, there is a person that carries the right kind of love and who wants to give that freely, with no impediment.  She is searching for me, seeking me out, as I am seeking for her.  Her heart calls, as mine calls.  It is only a matter of time and circumstance, because I know that we will meet.  

~ ~ ~

Unrequited Love Poem

On the bed

Lost and lonely

There I lie

Listening to the falling rain

Drops of life

Pitter patter to the ground

Dejected, rejected

It's happened again

I let myself belief

What a fool!

Always a fool

Dear precious heart

Why?

Do we never learn

Will we ever learn?

Or to go on

Blindly stumbling

In the dark

The long cold night

It bites at us

Seeps through our skin

A wind blows

Tinged with bitterness

I don't regret

Won't regret

That I tried

I believed

And here I am

Again

Alone

With the rain

That falls in my heart

And one drop

Runs down my cheek.

  _________________________

We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve

Last night, I watched the film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, starring Emma Watson, Ezra Miller and Logan Lerman.  During one scene, the main character Charlie, asks his English teacher why nice people always chose the wrong people to date?  The teacher replies, "We accept the love we think we deserve."

As soon as I heard these words, they struck a chord deep within me, a chord which resonated to the truth of them.  I realised the truth of them because they applied to me.  After the film had ended, I thought on these words and I reflected on my own life.  I thought about each of my past relationships and I was able to see that always, I chose to accept the love that I thought I deserved, which in my case, has often been the wrong kind of love.  The pattern of my past loves has always been the same.  Until last night, I did not understand why that was.  Now I do.

All of my life, since those first impressionable days, when I was evolving my thoughts and my views on how the world worked, I have carried around with me a very poor residual self image.  I have suffered from low self-esteem for most of my life.  When I was young, around the age of seven, I began to put on weight.  Throughout all of my formative years, I was what would be classed as a 'fat kid'.  Added to this, I have always been short in height compared to my peers, something that has never changed.  At the age of 12, my group of friends and I were avidly reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.  At school one day, one of my friends said that I looked like the character Bombur from the story.  For those who have never read the book, and who have not yet seen the movie by Peter Jackson, Bombur is the fattest, slowest dwarf, who is always eating.  The nickname was picked up by pretty much everyone in my school year and it was used so much, that when one of my classmates was handing back our exercise books after being marked by the teacher, he stopped and had to ask, "Who is Andrew Smith?" 

Being short and fat tends not to make one attractive to the opposite sex.  As my friends and the other boys of my school year were going out on dates, getting their first kisses, getting their first girlfriends, I was only getting rejected.  Every girl that I asked out said no to me.  It took all of my courage to ask, only to have my dreams quashed in an instant.  Funnily enough, as I think back now, as I told my friends one day at school, how I had cycled around to the home of a certain girl that I had a crush on and had asked her out on a date, the friend who gave me the nickname Bombur said to me that I had courage.  Even back then, at the age of twelve, the spirit of carpe diem was alive in me.  Now that is a very comforting thought to me as I sit and write this.

Everything that happened to me throughout these formative years reinforced in me the ideas that I was ugly, that I was a failure, that I was worthless.  My self-esteem, which I can recall was high early in my life, was sank further and further.  Every time I received another rejection, it only served to reinforce this notion of myself.  I used to lay in bed some nights and cry myself to sleep, telling myself that I was short, fat and ugly and that no one wanted me, that I was unloved, that I would never find love.  By the age of eighteen, after suffering from years of teasing and often being the butt of a joke, I did something about myself.  I had another moment of carpe diem, I dropped all of my so-called friends, and I began to change myself.  I lost the weight that had dogged me for so many years, but by then, the damage to my sense of esteem was already done.  I had formulated the opinion that I was not worthy of love and that I was unattractive.

Eventually, I did enjoy my first kiss, my first date, my first girlfriend and I fell in love for the first time.  My relationships never last very long though.  It has been remarked to me that I always let the 'good ones' go.  Often I have had the opportunity to form a long term relationship and I have walked away from it.  Back then, I could never have said why.  I always said to myself it is because I was scared of commitment, but now I have come to realise that this is not actually true.  My long term relationships have all been for the most part pretty complicated affairs.  I have never been able to figure out why this is.  Why is it that these relationships never ran smoothly? Why do I always fall in love with women that I think I can fix with my love?  Why do I persist in chasing someone who has doubts about a relationship with me, in the hope that I can make them change their mind?  Why do I try so hard to make someone love me?  Why do I continue to persist in a relationship when all of the signals are telling me no?  Why do I feel the need to prove that I am more worthy than another?  The answer lies in that line: we accept the love we think we deserve.

Last night, the truth was revealed to me through this line in the movie.  As those words were spoken, so I realised the utter truth of them for myself.  I have, for so many years, felt that I was unworthy of love, that I was undeserving of love.  Therefore, when love came knocking, I rejected those relationships that had real potential and instead, I chose those that were always going to involve complication.  In retrospect, I can see now that perhaps deep inside of me, I already knew the relationships would fail before they had even begun.  I was never conscious of thinking that at the time because at the time it happened, I was swept away by the romance of the situation and by the act of falling in love.  But I think that on some very deep subconscious level, I chose these relationships for exactly one reason only: they would ultimately prove that I was undeserving of love.  I created a self-fulling prophecy, which always came to fruition.  In a way, without ever knowing it, I sabotaged each and every one of my relationships before they had even begun.

It is my belief that a strong and healthy relationship must begin on equal footing.  Often, my relationships have not begun in this way.  Early on in the relationship, something was already going wrong.  I could see it, but I would not admit to it.  I thought that I could fight for love and win.  I thought I was deserving of this kind of love.  A love that is not freely given.  It is never right to begin a relationship thinking to yourself that you can fix the other person, that you can help them with their problems, that you can be the solution for them.  You cannot be.  No amount of love can do that.  Each one of us must first fix ourselves before we have a chance for a solid, long lasting, meaningful and loving relationship.  To think that the relationship itself or the love you bear for your partner can resolve problems is a fallacy.  To believe that you can fix someone through your love is not possible.  Not unless they come willingly and find their own solution through the love.  I see this now.  I saw it before only I denied myself the truth of it in order to find love.  The kind of love that I thought I deserved.  I was wrong.

Each of us is deserving of love.  Love is the glue that binds the universe.  Love is at the centre of all things.  Love cannot be denied.  Love is life and life is love.  They are one and the same.  You are life.  You are love.  You are worthy of love.  You are deserving of a strong and healthy love.  Do not settle for anything less.  Search your feelings, look deep inside of yourself, speak openly with your heart.  Seek the answers for yourself and if you find that your relationships are always a struggle, ask yourself if you feel that you are deserving of a special kind of love?  I can tell you one simple thing: you are.  You always were and you always will be.

This is probably the most deeply personal of my blog posts to date.  I am sharing this because I believe there is real value in sharing it.  I share my thoughts, not because I am searching for sympathy or empathy, I share my thoughts because I wish to make a difference.  If only one person should read this and it triggers a moment of realisation for them, then it is worthwhile.

Knowing what I know now, I am ready.  I am ready for the love that I deserve.  I am ready for the love of which I have been waiting my whole life.  My journey is my journey and I would not trade any of it, I would not change a single thing about it.  It is what has taught me the lessons.  It is what has brought me to here, to now.  For those that I have wronged because of my self belief in that I was undeserving of love, I say sorry and I ask your forgiveness.  We all learn.  That is the purpose of life.  We are evolving our souls.

We can never go back, we can only go on.  The one true path is the path of love.  Search inside of yourself, discover the love, discover your own one true path.  And know that the love you find there, is all that you deserve.

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