Most of us, have been single for a long time – months, years, decades. However, if we talk about our last heartbreak, we’ll see that it hasn’t been that long. Some of us had their heart broken a month ago, a week ago, or even two days ago.
Nowadays, everyone is healing from some kind of a “situationship,” or an “almost relationship.” Friends with benefits, casual dating, a fling, a one-night stand, you name it. It wasn’t a real relationship, but it hurt like one.
We struggle to move on, we are desperately looking for closure or some kind of an explanation from someone who wasn’t “officially” with us in the first place.
We’ve stopped committing, but we’ve never stopped getting our hearts broken.
And there lies the paradox. We avoid commitments because we think that’s the way to protect ourselves from any hurt. We are terrified of being lied to, cheated on, or left out in the cold. Our greatest fear is allowing someone near our heart and hurting us in the end.
We think we are protecting ourselves by avoiding committing, yet still, our hearts are breaking. It’s like we are getting all the pain that comes from being in a relationship and none of the benefits.
We spend hours and hours overthinking, stressing over, crying, and trying to make sense of where we stand with someone who hasn’t even introduced us to their friends or said they care about us.
We feel the uncertainty, we feel the jealousy, we feel the hurt that comes from loving someone, however, we are protecting ourselves from experiencing the good stuff out of fear that we might get hurt if we get too involved.
We avoid putting ourselves out there. We avoid stepping out of our comfort zones, we avoid getting into a relationship and growing attached to someone because our definition of ‘love’ and ‘pain’ is the same.
So, we tell ourselves that it’s better if we keep things casual. That we should play safe and avoid all the drama. We fool ourselves by discarding our hearts’ desire to love and be loved in a real way.
We think this way we are avoiding getting hurt, but that’s not true. We are still hurting. We are still in pain. We are still crying over someone who wasn’t ours. We are still mourning a relationship that never happened.
We need to stop doing this to ourselves. We need to stop protecting ourselves in this way and having our hearts shattered anyway…
