You Can Win the Person and Still Lose the Plot

Something strange happens after getting what you want, like that person you were so sure would make life worth living: instead of the expected relief, some sense of restlessness begins to creep in. It is a kind of low grade anxiety that you can’t quite explain (at least, not without sounding ungrateful).

If you are thinking, winning is supposed to end the story and you ride off happy into the sunset, well, yes, it is supposed to. And culturally, we are not allowed to make any expressions of unease after we get our “wins”. However, that is exactly how you feel: uneasy.

“Now, you know some wins actually expose you!”

You see, wins remove the thrill of the chase. Suddenly, you are left alone with whatever it was you were chasing, and then it turns out that what you were chasing was never the solution in the first place, and nobody warned you that this was coming. If you thought the tensions would disappear once you made it here, you are wrong because tension doesn’t disappear; in fact, it is slowly thickening the air.

This is almost maddening, because you believed you had pinpointed your problem and even given it a name. Now the problem is harder to point at.

The thing is, only some wins are clean victories; others are just revealing, and when they come, they don’t exactly fix the underlying problems; they just remove the distraction that kept you from really addressing them.

“Suddenly you are left alone with whatever it was you were chasing, and then it turns out that what you were chasing was never the solution in the first place.”

And so, people have found that they sabotaged good things, starting fights they don’t need to fight, and the “peace” in the end still made them itchy because it never solved the things they thought it would.

So yes, they may have won the person, but they lost the storyline of their life that kept everything simple, and you can see this play out most clearly when you observe secret relationships that come into the light, and the very thing that felt intoxicating before now feels pretty ordinary. The affair was never really about love but escape, and now they come face to face with reality. Unfortunately, many are not ready for that encounter.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.