I spent five months being incredibly careful and deliberate about not having any sort of contact with E. Mostly? To get over him... and partially to test myself and my feelings for him. In those five months, I learned a lot of things: about him, about us, about me. Maybe, I even learned a lot more about us in that five month span that I ever did in the year and a half that we were pseudo together.
The most important thing I learned was that I was never in love with him (which is really a lot less heart breaking than it sounds). I loved him (and I still do) and cared about him enough to put up with shit that I wouldn't ever stand for with anybody else. I don't think I have ever in my life made up that many excuses for one person; which I suppose is proof that I cared about him more than I was ever willing to admit. I also realized that there was no way that I could possibly have fallen in love with him. After all, what did I really have to fall in love with? A warm body, and comforting arms? I didn't have much to go on besides that. Our pseudo "relationship" never really made it past his bedroom walls, and that's not really a relationship at all. It was definitely a skewed version of something that echoed a "normal" relationship. Except, we never "dated" and did "normal people" things. Everything about us was backwards from the beginning.
I guess I'm old fashioned that way, I need to be wooed to fall in love. Huh. What a concept.
I also discovered how much I hate secrecy and lies. I really tend to consider myself an honest person. Blunt, in fact. Conceivably, even a little rude and tactless. So you can imagine how I felt about keeping something that was such an integral part of my life for a year and a half publicly nonexistent. In short, I hated hiding. There's not much more to say about that.
For the most part though, most of the things I learned, were about myself. Essentially, about how ridiculous I can be. When I am convinced that I am completely in control of a situation, I am loathe to let it go. I cling onto the delusion that if I control everything, absolutely EVERYTHING than there is little to no chance of my own feelings getting hurt.
I basically had it my way the whole time we were together. I decided when I wanted to see him, how long I wanted to see him for and when it ended. I never asked him what he wanted, or even stopped to think that maybe what he wanted was completely different from what I desired. I just made all these decisions on my own and he basically just went along with them.
You're only a victim if you let yourself become one.
