Love’s Losers Lost

Posted by fxckfeelings on January 24, 2019

As we’ve hopefully made painfully clear by now, the most powerful emotions tend to fuel our
poorest decisions; deep despair can lead to anything from substance abuse to misspelled tattoos
while blinding love can bind you to someone whom you, in saner times, wouldn’t so much as
follow on Twitter. There’s no point then in being ashamed of the company love can drive you to
keep. The only shame comes from not using the heartbreak to learn how to better protect
yourself, retain your values, and exercise your judgment next time. Then your bad experience
can become an anchor that will keep you from getting swept away by any waves of intense
emotion that may hit you in the future.

-Dr. Lastname
Simply put, I’ve been dating and subsequently fell for an older man (in his 50s) who, without telling me, had plans the whole time to marry a 22-year-old Central American stripper. He finally admitted this to me by explaining that he’s in love with her but still wants to be my very good friend. Of course, I am still in love with him and he is very aware of that. My dumb ass is waiting for his feelings to change, which I realize is, well, dumb, but I don’t know what else to do. How do I get over this? My goal is to figure out whether I can be his friend, or whether that’s a reasonable/doable option to begin with.

F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship

Falling for someone should never mean forgetting your own priorities, needs, and values, but
sometimes it does, which means you’ve haven’t so much fallen in love as you have into a
bottomless pit.

When this happens, what you need most isn’t a lifeline to him via friendship or any other
possible connection, but a chance to remember who are you and what your goals were before
you decided that having and keeping a particular person’s love was more important than
anything else.

Prioritizing your goals for someone else’s feelings ahead of your goals for yourself is always
problematic, firstly because it’s a good way to downgrade your own importance and put yourself
under the control of someone else and his decisions. Now this person isn’t just in your heart, but
in your head, which is how you can end up losing track of yourself and your own needs in the
endless abyss.

Secondly, as you’ve already tried and failed to do, you can’t change another person’s feelings for
someone else, so continuing to commit yourself to changing someone or something that can’t be
changed will only frustrated and depress you further while having the added fun side effect of
annoying your beloved straight into his the arms of his barely-legal paramour.
So your goal isn’t to hang onto whatever is left of your boyfriend’s love and attention, but to ask
yourself what kind of character a person has to have in order to be a good, reliable friend before
asking yourself whether this guy has that kind of character. Which, spoiler alert, he doesn’t.

If you were to judge a stranger who started up a relationship with one person while he was
knowingly in love with someone else, you’d think he was an insensitive, selfish asshole. Not
because you were angry with him personally—he’s a stranger, after all—but because his behavior
showed that he didn’t care about anyone other than himself and that he doesn’t know better than
to use and hurt other people. If your friend was hung up on such a stranger, you’d tell her he
wasn’t worth it. So when it comes to this asshole who isn’t a stranger, it’s time to be a better
friend to yourself.

Instead of interpreting the lingering heartache as a sign that you need him in your life, take it as a
signal from the surface that you’ve made a mistake and need to learn from it in order to get back
up. Get busy doing things that satisfy your need to be a strong, independent person who doesn’t
let assholes into her head, heart, or life overall.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like I can’t live without the guy I fell for and that I need to see him, and it’s true that I
can’t help thinking about him all the time and feeling sad. I know, however, that he’ll never be
someone I can trust as a good friend and that I deserve someone better, so I will learn to live with the pain, rebuild my independence, and become much more choosy about who I let into my
heart.”