Every man I’ve ever known wants to believe he’s different from the last. In fact, between their love of a challenge and their desire to distinguish themselves from the last lover, they come in strong with the assertion that this time will be different. Our mistake is in believing them.
I’m not saying that every partner is the same as the one before. I am saying that they all seem to do their damage — creating a new twist on our old trauma. They want to prove that they are different and instead prove they aren’t really different at all.
I don’t love my own cynicism right now. It lurks on the edges of my acceptance that the relationship I want is over. If something I was so sure about could become so uncertain, how can I trust anything ever again?
I feel ready to move forward, and yet I wonder if I’ll ever be able to fall in love again without also feeling an overwhelming fear that any love given could be summarily withdrawn. How will I ever know if they’ve fallen in love with the words or with the woman who writes them? How can I trust that any affection expressed won’t be swept away on a changing wind?
The change is all I’ve known. Those strong initial feelings faded the more they knew me, and it’s hard to see one as being different from the others when the result is the same. I’m left here wondering how I’m expected to love again when every experience of it leaves me with overwhelming grief.
I’m wondering how I’m expected to trust that someone else will be different when there’s a long line stretching behind me of more of the same. I want to believe. I want to hope. But, in this moment, all I feel is overwhelming doubt and the ache of grief that I could give so much love to other people and sit here staring at my own empty hands still open and waiting to receive.
Someone somewhere is tempted to tell me that my own self-love is meant to fill that space. That someone somewhere can take their well-meaning but useless advice and go smudge themselves. I have all the self-love in the world, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with also wanting reciprocated romantic love and companionship to enter the picture at some point in time.
Today, I am tired. My acceptance has sharp edges in it that I will have to work to smooth out. This is the work of healing. I am sitting with the knowledge that even the healthiest of relationships can damage us when they’re done, leaving us with the love they don’t want and the grief of futures imagined that will never, ever be. Even the best relationship, once over, makes us question ourselves.
Perhaps it’s not the partners who are all the same but the repeating pattern of relationships. The initial soaring hope followed by the inevitable crash landing is a bruising, jarring experience. I am left shaken by it.
It’s made worse in some ways by the fact that I write about my experiences, and as I go back to read them, I am revisited by the ghost of the woman who felt loved without knowing that she wasn’t loved at all. Every story written before the end is now overshadowed by the ending. I am haunted by them.
They read me and think they know me. They think they love me, and then they know me long enough to realize they don’t. And I, the unwitting narrator, chart the progress of my love and their leaving.
I don’t want to meet another person who declares themselves different, who rushes to assure me that they will deliver on promises that everyone who came before broke. I want to free my experience of love from the fear and grief that surrounds it. I want to be able to fall in love and trust that love can last.
I know that every relationship isn’t meant to last. I know that some are just growth experiences meant to teach us something we need to know. I know there are lessons in the fragile beginnings and in the devastating endings.
I know all of this. Yet, I still have to go through the full experience of grief — including the doubt that anything will ever end differently than this.
I look at my past and see that none of them were different and all of them were. I am healing old wounds while managing new ones. I am working to smooth those sharp edges of my grief and lean further into acceptance. I am waiting for hope to outweigh my fear.
I am still waiting.
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Previously published on medium
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