Destroy & Rebuild: The Love That Broke Me

You'll never love someone like your first true love.

I usually don't talk about the one love that changed way that I look at everything now. The main reason I don't go back to that time or that person is because it doesn't benefit me to dwell on failing at something I really wanted to succeed at. Like everything in my life I take the bumps and learned about the lessons that come with them but other than that, I keep it out of my mind and out of my sight. That's just who I am; a person that leaves the past in the past but carries the lessons learned forward into the next situation. But I wasn't always like this, I wasn't always the person that applied learned lessons and I surely wasn't the person that always saw room for growth or opportunity. I didn't always have hope.

I'm going to be quite frank here with what I'm about to say and honestly that's something that I've struggled with for a long time. A lot of people always ask me about what happened or ask me about how I feel currently and every single time I give them the same answers. I NEVER give the honest answer because most people just want to be nosey and don't care about my personal wellbeing. They just want something to talk about or have some sort of glimpse into the life of guy who's kept everything to himself for most of it. Here on this blog I'm pretty clear with each post in the sense that I tell a story strictly about what I want you to know. I can write multiple blog posts about one situation or a single conversation that I have with someone; that's my talent. I can pull lessons out of any and everything if I really wanted to.

But today I'm going to talk about the woman who I loved more than life itself and how I ruined it.

Now I will be the first person to tell you that I sabotage relationships, a lot. Apparently I give off the impression that I get hurt in relationships and that most of mine end in a blaze of glory. I can tell you right now that isn't true, even in the slightest of sense. To be honest, (from what I can remember), every single relationship that I've ever had prior to my last two I've ended because I wasn't in it mentally anymore. While at the time the woman I was dating hated me to no end and wished every bad thing under the sun, she eventually came to respect me because I didn't waste her time like most men. Although a couple of them are married now there isn't one that couldn't come to me and have an honest conversation about anything for the simple fact that I respected them enough to tell them that I wasn't there anymore and I respected them enough to tell them that and just leave.

I say all that to point out the fact that I wasn't mentally or emotionally progressing at all because I always clocked out or ran away when it was time to face a problem. That lasted for years until I had one ex, (neither of the two mentioned earlier), that flat out told me that I needed work on being more emotionally available and that I couldn't keep running from commitment the way I was use to doing. I realized that she was right and I made a concentrated effort to improve that front. After that ended for the same reasons as all the others I met another ex, (also not either mentioned before), and tried to do better. That as well ended the same way as the others. I realized that I couldn't succeed any relationship because I was never really emotionally invested in any of them.

That was until I met the first of my last two exes. One was the woman I always wanted when I was in college, but it simply never worked out. Well some odd years later and some major life events on both of our parts we managed to come together once more. This was the first relationship that I was fully vested in emotionally for the simple fact that it was something I really wanted. Now I'm not going into details about what happened but let's just say something major happened that really changed me and the way that I viewed relationships. For a little while I really hated the idea of ever being with one woman. I made myself believe that love wasn't real and that commitment was just a facade created to keep you chasing what someone else’s idea of love really was. To be honest I even started to question God if he was even real and if he was then I question his purpose for me.

Then I met her ..

You think you know what love really is until you actually run across it. When you run across it you don't really feel it until one day when you sit back and you just look at that person and realize that there's nowhere else on this planet that you'd rather be than next to them. You hear all the time how you literally see the whole entire world in a different light when you're in love. The days are a little brighter, the grass a little greener, the breeze is a little gentler and your beats a little bit more calmly. Well that was me, I was that happy when I was with her. Every single negative thing that I experienced in my life in regards to love forever changed. When that came along I just knew that it was the love sent to save me before I destroyed myself.

It wasn't anything over the top that she was doing; it wasn't anything regarding special treatment or anything like that. It was the simplicity of it all that made me feel the way I did. In a mind where there are a million thoughts coming across it at a second she made it all seem so clear. But then things happened, both in my control and out of it, and it ended; just like that. Of course I went through my days of not eating and being super stressed out and tripping over it. I spent a lot of time to myself and I was very distant from people even when I was around them. But once I got over it and started to look back at what got me to that point and what I did wrong, I started to understand myself more and more.

I finally started to realize and accept who I am: a man that loves.

In a time where people love out of necessity instead of because it feels right in their heart, I'm a person that doesn't do that. And it's not just relationships that I'm referring to; it's every single aspect of my life. I realize that I was settling too much in every aspect of my life to accommodate someone at some point instead of doing things that made me happy. When I was with her I found the most pleasure in the simplest of things we did. And to be honest it made me happy that she was happy. Now in retrospect I realized that we different in every single way imaginable in other regards that made it difficult at times. When it came down to loving each other, that's the one thing that we got right every single time, regardless of what we had going on at the time. But I wouldn't go back and change anything because it restored my faith in the one thing I want most in this world: a woman that loves me as pure and true as God intended it to be. 

And that's why it's going on three years that I've been single and that no woman that I've dated has lasted more than a couple of weeks. That thing I did early in my life where I ended relationships because I was emotionally invested, coupled with my understanding on how I love people and the need to be more opened has shown me the road I need to take in order to cross paths with a woman that I would more than my last ex who changed everything. I don't know God's plans for me, and I might go through the same thing I went through my last ex, but what I do know now is that love is real and it's out there. For me it came through a person who knew how to love me by simply being herself and that's the greatest gift of them all. It's possible to find yourself in someone else, even if you're not looking there in the first place. While that may seem scary and dangerous, it's actually the best thing to happen to you once you recover. I've officially left the destruction part behind and I'm fully vested in rebuilding myself to be better for the next time that God decides he wants that love to come around. 

Life is funny sometimes if you open your eyes and see it for what it is ..