Love

What is Love?

The ancient Greeks called it "Madness of the Gods". 
Modern psychologists and neuroscience tells us it's a drive like thirst. They define it as a strong desire for emotional union with another person. 
Emotionally, love is all-consuming, empowering, insane and dangerous. 


4 Stages of Love

1. The Honeymoon Period
2. Aftermath of the Honeymoon Period (aka Becoming a Real Couple)
3. Disillusionment
4. Building Real Everlasting Love

There are a few lucky ones, that manage to beat the odds and make it to build real everlasting love. However, most of the people I know, including myself, never make it past the disillusionment stage, and here's why.
This is my story, it doesn't have a happy ending and right now it doesn't even have an ending. If you're one of the people still in the honeymoon phase, this might not be the story for you, but for those of you that have been in love and never made it past disillusionment, stick around and maybe you'll find something relatable, something that empowers you, or simply something that let's you know hey, I'm not suffering alone.


The Honeymoon Period

Ahh...those bliss-filled days...
Everything is new and exciting. Every new facet you discover of your partner is a new wonder and delight to you. Hours spent in each other's company feels like mere minutes. You can't get enough of him or her and he or she, of you. Each time your phone rings your heart beats a little bit faster in anticipation of a new message from him or a cute selfie he's sent you.

Along the way you start discovering each other's bad traits too, he snores like a freight train or he's always on his phone, busy with something else. But you're okay with that because the rose-colored lenses of the honeymoon period still blind you and you brush off these unsavoury traits as insignificant. You think, "true love is about accepting both the good and bad parts of your partner" so you keep it to yourself because you have your bad traits too.

But that's the beginning of the end of the Honeymoon Period.


Aftermath of the Honeymoon Period (aka Becoming a Real Couple)

This is when the rose-colored lenses start to come off and you realise that those bad traits you see in your partner are not as insignificant as you once thought they were. Snoring like a freight train becomes inconsiderate as it affects your rest. You start sleeping further away from each other at night in an effort to reduce the volume of his snoring. You no longer hug each other or cuddle each other to sleep, because he or she becomes an uncomfortable warmth on a hot night and nobody likes sleeping with a koala or spider monkey attached to them.

Sometimes, I look over at him and wonder if I should make the first move to be closer to each other again. But I remember all the inconveniences it brings about to the both of us and decide against it. While he's snoring away, I lie awake thinking. We share the same bed, mere centimeters away from each other physically, so why does it feel like our hearts are worlds apart.

You hate this feeling of drifting away from each other so you make more of an effort to ask your partner out on more dates, spend more time in each other's company. For awhile, it seems that it might be working, that things are taking a turn for the better. But then, it starts happening again, always busy on his phone or busy somewhere else, means hours spent away from you. You wonder what you're doing wrong and the love that once filled you turns ugly.
Insecurity, paranoia, jealousy.
This causes more problems because while you were worrying about this relationship alone at night, he's out with his friends, having fun, he doesn't have a care in the world about you, or this relationship. While he's partying with his friends that you don't know, you think, "is he with some other girl now? Is she prettier than me? "Is her body better than mine? What do they have that I don't?"  and then, there comes a day when your worst nightmare has come true.
Someone else is involved. 
It's as if a bomb has exploded and your heart is now a wasteland. You go numb, and then you get angry at him, "why? I sacrificed so much for you"  But you still love him, too much to let go so you search for a reason, because everything happens for a reason right? And you come to the realisation that maybe you're the reason.
So you change yourself, push yourself, to prove a point or to beg him to come back to you, maybe both. But whatever you try, doesn't seem to work, and at the back of your mind, there's a voice telling you that you're not good enough for him, you're less of a person, so he chose someone else.


Disillusionment

After you've tried everything, bent over backwards to please him, went against your values and degraded your self-worth, finally you see, the warm hand you so cherished, loved and held on to at the start has become a hand with sharp thorns with poisoned tips that pierce you a little bit deeper, making you bleed a little bit more with each argument and disagreement. The poison flows a little deeper into your veins, and you die a little more inside with each cancelled date and each night you lay awake thinking, "Where did it all go so wrong? Could I have done something to make it better?" 

It's never easy letting go because the thorns have sunk so deep into you, you know that when you rip them out you tear a large chunk of yourself away with it. The poison has sunk so deep in your veins, you've lost sight of who you once were and you want to hurt your partner as much as they have hurt you.

"Holding on to anger and hate is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."
This is where it ends, it's past time to let go, because I have bled myself for too long on your thorns. 

-R