I’ve been trying to find reasons why my first relationship was not love at all.
If I take what I’ve learned so far in Philosophy class, then put all of my bitterness aside for a while, I can see only one reason why I can say that it was love. The relationship began from an experience of loneliness: I had the emotional baggage of broken friendships and the feeling that no one understood and accepted me, while he was dealing with the reality that his crush didn’t like him, but his closest cousin. I had become his crying shoulder; he became my first male friend. We became each other’s answer to loneliness.
But honestly, that’s where it stops. There would have been so many other points in the Philosophy lecture that I could have taken, and then twisted so I could tell myself that, yes, I really did love my ex-boyfriend. What we had really was love, and I didn’t waste three years of my life on anything other than that. But there will always be something about those points that will rebut my statements, so I decided to just accept it: we didn’t truly love each other.
First, I liked him as a friend and became closer to him because we both loved to talk. We could talk about the most inane things till the wee hours of the morning, and I liked having someone whom I could talk to. But as the relationship progressed, I realize now that we liked to talk about one thing: ourselves. I would call him up to vent out the most insignificant detail of my day blown up to magnanimous proportions. On some days, he would talk about all his accomplishments, being able to do this and that today. I guess there is only so much that you can say about yourself. In the end, we were just repeating ourselves –the same problems, the same accomplishments—until there really was nothing left to say.
Second, our relationship was highly dysfunctional: much of it was spent apart and the relationship survived through the telephone. He lived in Malate, while I live in Antipolo. We would see each other only once a month for the first two years, then once a week during the third year. Our love could only be expressed in a limited way: through speech. And as we know, love is not only saying but also doing. If he had really wanted to, there would always have been a way for him to come to my house and visit me whenever I was sick, or even just to see me. But he never went out of his way to do that, and so I never really felt that I was being cared for. And perhaps, he felt the same way because there are also many things that I could have done, but didn’t do. So I guess, without really accepting it then, so much more was being required of us than just the words “I love you and I care about you.” We actually had to show it, but we didn’t.
Third, our experience started with loneliness, and we became a couple because we just thought it made sense: after all, I was making his days brighter and he was becoming the best friend I never had. Eventually, I did love him because I wanted to take care of him and all that, but the role he played in my life and its importance to me was always something that had been at the back of my mind. It was something that I sought for, not something that I just allowed to happen: I actively wanted someone to love me, and there he was. If I didn’t think that he could love me back, I probably would not have loved him the way I did. This is why I can say that it wasn’t love: the desire to be loved in return was ultimately the motive of our loving one another.
And these three reasons just so far analyze the beginnings of my failed relationship. So much has happened in three years that, if I get to the nitty-gritty details of it, I can probably think of more reasons and examples on why it wasn’t love. But it would be much better to use the end of the relationship paralleled against the characteristics of love to illustrate this point.
Even after three years of being with him, I never really knew much about his family, his childhood, his friends, and all the other things that comprised his life. All that I knew were the superficial things: he liked playing Counterstrike and other internet games, so much that he would ask to call me back because he was in the middle of a game. He liked to sing and show-off to people. All qualities. All abilities. But deep inside, I must have known that knowing these things about him was not enough. There were many instances when I pushed away the nagging feeling that I didn’t know my own boyfriend, simply because I was scared that it was true.
How can I say, then, that I loved him, when I didn’t even know the history that shaped him into the person that he was? I saw all the little things about him, but I failed to see the bigger picture: the totality of his being.
People are equal in love.
I thought long and hard about this one and realized that both of us would probably say that we were “under”. He would probably have his own share of stories to tell about how I always got my way and how it was always about me. Those stories are probably none of my business anymore. But on my end, I can say that I was “under” not only because of things he did that placed me in that position, but also because of decisions I’ve made.
One thing that I had always found myself doing was asking for his permission to do things. There was once a time when all of my other friends had gone out to eat in Libis, and I was left in school with a male friend of mine because we had both been in class. So he asked if I had eaten and if I wanted to eat out. Immediately, I thought of what my ex-boyfriend would think. I wanted to refuse the invitation because my ex-boyfriend might get jealous, but I was really hungry, and I had never experienced eating out with a male friend alone. So I tried to remedy the situation by calling up my ex-boyfriend to ask for his permission. In the end, I couldn’t contact my ex-boyfriend and I let my hunger get the best of me. I went out with my male friend, only to be eventually joined by two other friends.
To this day, I wonder how it would have felt to just immediately answer “yes” when my male friend extended the invitation to me. But most of all, I wonder why I felt the need to ask for his permission as if I couldn’t make my own decisions.
And there were many other things that I had foregone, no matter how little they were. Television shows that I loved to watched but didn’t because we had to talk on the phone for the night. Lunch dates with friends that I would have gone to, but didn’t because it was a Wednesday, the day of the week when we would see each other. All these things I had foregone not out of self-sacrifice, but out of a sense of duty and obligation.
In many other instances in the relationship, I didn’t feel free to make my own decisions and do what the things I wanted, when I wanted.
How can it be love when I didn’t feel free to be me?
Love is total.
Love is total because two people in love are indivisible. The way I understand this, there is an implication of a bond between the two people such that they become indivisible because of this bond. As I said, distance was a big factor for the relationship: a strong foundation could not be built simply over the telephone wires. It takes more than speech to form this bond, and unfortunately, the relationship was overflowing with speech and largely lacking in deeds and actions. It had gone on as long as it did because I refused to let go. I didn’t want to see that the relationship needed more than just words to survive. So I hung on as long as I did, trying to keep things together even if it was all falling apart. If it were really love, I wouldn’t have had to try so hard to keep things together; they would have just stayed together on their own. United we stand, divided we fall. And fall is just what we did.
Love is eternal.
I had always believed in this, but apparently, my ex-boyfriend didn’t. For reasons still unknown to me, he found another girl and tried to get the best of both worlds by being with her and with me at the same time.
He had tried to tell me many times, even in not-so-subtle ways: he would tell me that he had found his soulmate in her, that they had a complementary relationship because they shared the same interests –while ours was supplementary because our interests weren’t the same—and that she was his seatmate, groupmate, and closest friend in school. The clincher was when he told me he loved me, but said her name instead.
I should have broken it off then, because obviously he loved her and not me, but because of my belief that love is eternal, I still hung on.
Love is sacred.
The only time that I finally let go was when I realized that I have value too, that I am worth something, that I have to love myself more. I was hurting myself so much by enduring all that pain, and it was time to let my heart rest from the pain. After this initial realization of my self-worth, I realized that in taking another woman, he didn’t value me at all. He didn’t respect me enough to just tell me straight-out, in no unclear terms, that he wanted out of the relationship. And I didn’t value myself enough to seek that kind of respect when it was lacking. I didn’t value myself enough to see that I deserved much better treatment than this. In trying so hard to keep the relationship together, I tried to show him how much I had loved him. And in the process, I forgot to love myself.
Conclusion
Almost a year has passed since I ended the relationship. I have not talked to my ex-boyfriend since then, and I have come to live my life as though he doesn’t exist. But I cannot deny that I did share an experience with him for a part of my life. That is a reality that I have come to accept, and it is one that I must live with until the day that I die.
The only difference is, I now realize, that experience just wasn’t love. It never was.