What do you take away from a relationship?
Brace yourselves, folks, for another episode of Real Talk With Edye: Breakup Edition.
So I was rereading old messages the other day, and I got a little bummed because there was a time awhile ago where everyone was fangirling when I followed them, and that stopped, and it feels (sometimes) like I get fewer nice messages, but here’s the thing. At one point, those people felt those things. And the fact that people in general may no longer be feeling those things, that doesn’t make them invalid.
See, when you lose a relationship in your life, it’s so easy to view it almost as object permanence: they loved you while you were there, but now that they’re gone, the love and the memories are too. Well, that’s not true. Every time they told you that you’re beautiful, every time they told you how much you were loved… those things don’t go away.
The greatest gift of all, I think, is to be loved AND to have loved. My breakup with Alec was terrible, painful, even devastating at times. It’s easy to be bitter (and I am), but I can’t say I got nothing from it. Just because he changed his mind doesn’t mean he never truly loved me. At some point in time, I was loved by him; he did think I was beautiful; he was there for me. Accordingly, though I don’t particularly feel he deserves anything (I really am bitter), I have given him something wonderful: my own love, even though it’s gone. For some time, he was the only person I trusted; he was the best friend I ever had; he made me happier than anyone else did.
I could look back on that and feel like shit. I could think, Wow, what a goddamn waste of time that was. He didn’t deserve it. But I choose not to, because loving him was a gift to myself as well. To care about somebody so entirely, to always want to be with them, is an incredible experience. Some people go most of their lives without experiencing it. Yes, there is pain in loving someone. But there is also beautiful, human emotion.
Doing a postmortem after a relationship ends badly is never easy. And so I remind myself constantly, that in the end, what I took away from the relationship was this tremendous gift. Just because he doesn’t find me so beautiful and doesn’t love me anymore doesn’t mean it erases his sentiments; it doesn’t make me less beautiful or less loved.
If you are struggling with the loss of somebody who meant a great deal, whose absence feels like a whole in your life for a bit, who perhaps impacted your self esteem more than you’d like to admit… remember this. Even though they left you, their words remain as a memory, and if those words were spoken with truth at the time, then they are no less true now than they were then. And even though they left you, they left you with two gifts: one, being loved; and two, having loved.
Hang in there, folks. We’ll all get through this together.
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