All I'm Losing is Me

I have this theory about relationships. I think most people have the same kinds of relationships. I might be wrong, and this might be symptomatic of my need to categorize  and over think nearly everything, but when you’re in a group of friends talking about various significant others, invariably someone will say “yeah, that’s just like when I was with so and so.” I think the most common one is the one that hurts most. And it hurts most not because he was a jerk (although he probably was) or because it was long and drawn out. It’s the worst because you make it the worst… because all along you thought it was the best. It’s the relationship where you fall hard, often for the first time. You can’t let go. When shit gets tough you convince yourself that nothing can stop the magical force that is the love between him and you. People lose themselves in this territory. People neglect their own individual self concept and see themselves only in relation to their relationship. And when people do this, they forget about the things that make them super awesome individuals. In the end, this makes the relationship harder because the other might start to dislike you and you start to resent the other for making you this way.


People forget they have friends, which makes the break up that much harder. You have to convince them to take you back, even though you haven’t called them in weeks and called them bitches when they told you he was bad for you. And because you forgot that you had hobbies and interests separate from the relationship, you don’t have anything to distract you from the pain the break up is causing. And when you finally realize that he was a jerk, you feel contempt for yourself that you stuck it out, tried to make it work, and wasted all that time when you could have been doing things that you forgot you love to do and you could have been with people that you forgot were awesome. But you learn from it.

Hopefully, most people get this relationship out of the way in high school. My version of this story ended after my first year of university after two long and hard years. I was a totally different person after that. I grew up a lot and my new university friends even noticed the huge metamorphosis. I remember my roommate saying “it was funny how you changed. I thought, ‘I never knew she was fun like that!’” When the disaster ended I remembered how much I liked to go out, play guitar, and write. I realized that smoking weed and watching The OC on DVD every night was not as much fun as I had thought it was. I was much happier once I got over it. Now I know: proceed with caution and stay true to yourself.