Author's note: This is a personal reflection from a past relationship. Names/details changed.
It hit me suddenly as to why I can't let go of someone who deeply hurt me. Even though he said mean and terrible things to me, and about me, he also gave me moments I'd never experienced and so desperately longed for my entire life. He didn't love me but there were times he told me he did and it completely rewired my brain to keep attempting to get it back.
My father didn't love me. Yes, we knew there were daddy issues here. He told me in many ways. Any love he felt for me was out of an obligation to being a parent, and to the God he worshiped, but he didn't love me as a person. I was told I was his least favorite child and he didn't like looking at me because I looked like my mother. I was hard for him to love and he felt a need to let me know this.
My ex husband was next. I do think he loved me briefly, when I was compliant and giving him what he wanted. That dissipated quickly. His actions were much louder than his words, and his words were rare. I wasn't never first in his life. Not even second place. I was a distant thought, an annoyance, and a paycheck.
Then he came along and swept me off my feet. Said he loved me within days. Said I was perfect. One of my first journal entries after we met said. "I know by all standards it's too fast and I don't care. Yet there is this nagging thought that I'll care later." It was over a year of back and forth, epic fights with spectacular make ups. Though once he first discarded me it never got back to those first moments and my mind became laser focused on nothing but that. Called names, told everything was my fault, and I'm sure so much more behind my back. Yet I couldn't let go.
People like to say "you deserve so much more". Of course I do. We all do. Yet there is an implication that by being deserving you'll also get it. It's also said in a way that implies I don't believe I deserve it, and this is why it never happens. The parallels to my Evangelical upbringing "your prayers aren't being answered because you don't have enough faith" aren't lost on me. How exactly do you believe in this fairy tale magic when it's been shown over and over your entire life to never happen? I mean how could I not fall?
I love the poem by Louise Erdrich that talks about the search for love, the human condition, and that for some of us the effort is all we get. I can say this; my love was real, I did all I could, and I know none of this was my fault. Yet it's what I have to live with in this life.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
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