Whoever wrote "it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all" must never have really loved anyone, because anyone who feels the pain of unrequited love feels differently. Far too many people think they are in love or love someone or are loved when some other word applies better. True love is forever. True love means something, even if it doesn't bear the fruit you hope or validate what you think you deserve or work out. If, after your "love" goes unrequited, you lash out and hurt others, wish them bad, bad mouth them, then anyone who really knows anything knows that you didn't really love the object of your affection. That's the problem with love, that so many people, like Sabatini's Scaramouche "fall in love constantly, indiscriminately, and the effect is the same as if they never fell in love at all". It doesn't mean anything. It isn't about the other person. It does not lift or elevate or build anything or anyone. I know it's hard. I am loathe to honestly admit I realize now that I didn't really love my ex wife. I thought I did, but I didn't really then, and I've had to learn how to love her as a child of God after the fact in order to become the person I desire to be. When you really love someone, you give them power to hurt you and hope that they don't use it against you, but all too often it ends in pain because they either don't return it or don't return it in a way that leads to a fruitful disposition. Real love has several key facets, and chief among them are the following:
Celebrating their happiness while you long for your own
Since you really loved them, you desire their happiness and genuinely feel good to see them happy. You are glad that they finally made a choice and set themselves decidedly to a path. You hope that they find happiness even though they are basically the opposite sometimes of what they were when you knew and loved them. You rejoice when they finish college, get a job, strike out on their own and then find someone "amazing" to replace you in their life. You decide, rather than rebound, to wait, and then the waiting turns from months to years, as you wonder if and when you'll finally get what they promised you while you watch them keep those same promises with someone else. You try not to lash out, because you love them, and because love doesn't hurt in order to heal itself. As you watch their life in pictures pass before your eyes, you hope that this new person doesn't break their heart. Ironically, even though they hurt you, you defend them, because you don't want them hurt, by you, by this new person, by life. You know better than to ride to the rescue if they decide to make a life without you, but you find yourself praying to God to bless them, sometimes not because you are excited for them to mate, marry and multiply with another, but because you know God loves them too. While you die inside, you watch them smile, laugh, and mate with someone who isn't you even though they promised to change your life for the better when the only promise they kept is that you would never hear from them again. People don't usually do that because they are selfish and like to remain in control, and you know they probably won't realize ever that you did the right thing or reward you for it. You do this because it's what you hope people who truly love you will do- encourage you to follow your own path.
Wondering what if anything actually was real
A popular cartoon circulating the internet claims that you shouldn't weep because you didn't lose someone that loved you, but they did. Well, that's kind of selfish. You do weep, because you really did love them. You put your heart out there, and even if they didn't smash it with a hammer, they left it sitting there to die. You wonder as they keep their promises to others but the only promise they made to you is that you'd never see them again if anything they said meant anything. You wonder if you misread them, even as you remember how they smiled with their entire body when you made them laugh. You remember the inflection in their voice, the feelings in your heart, and then you doubt YOURSELF in addition to them. You find yourself wondering if maybe it would be better if they had never come at all and agreeing with the cynicism spoken by the Dread Pirate Roberts about the promise of a woman. Real love cannot be so tenuous a thing that it takes many months to build and mere moments to destroy, and so since they don't seem to love you anymore, you begin to doubt the veracity of their love. Johnny Depp once advised us that if you love two people, pick the second, because you never would have fallen for that person if you truly loved the first. As this person makes their life with someone else, you realize they may have never loved you, and even if you try, you find you can't replace them or really get involved with anyone else as long as you're not really over them. Years pass, you meet other people, but since you really did love them, you find it difficult to bury them in the past because it means burying part of you with them. You know that part is a real loss, and so you hold on, longer than you ought perhaps, hoping to find a lesson or a reward or an opportunity in the ashes left by the dying embers of your love.
Wrestling with rejection and feelings of inadequacy
You were a great guy until you were not. At one time, you were practically perfect in every way, and now someone else is practically perfect and you're completely removed. You wonder what is wrong with you, if there is some character flaw that keeps you from happiness and love and warmth, not necessarily because you know there is one but because you're the only person you can change. Why are other people worthy of the sacrifice? Why would they change religions for someone else but not for you? Why is their moped fine but your cars were not? Why would they move in with someone else but they wouldn't even move out for you? Every time that they pick someone that you consider less than you you wonder what they see in that person that you lack or that you at least can't see. When they pick someone who looks better than you, you curse your genes for not admitting you to the Lucky Sperm Club. You watch them marry others, have kids together, and post the rosy bits of their lives to social media, and although you know things happen that they don't post, you wonder why you weren't permitted to share those joys with them. You wonder why they never posted pictures of YOU to their social media and if they think poorly of you if they think of you at all. You jump to the conclusion that they dislike you, disdain you, disavow you, and so you do the same to yourself. Rather than having them return in regret and ask to try again, you receive all sorts of repudiation for things that don't matter or things you can't change without changing who you are. If your problem is that you are you, why did they date you in the first place?
Hurting each time you remember
Although you try to remember the good times, you remember everything else too, because that was also part of the story. Bad times come coupled with the remembrance of things that make you smile, sad shadows attached to the pedestrians of memory. Each time you remember, the chill winds of rejection blow through the hole they made in your heart, and the frost of abandonment creates its blue crystals on your soul against the gray skies of time. You find yourself unable to move forward because you still see it perfectly in your head, because you keep tokens, because you remember things they said and that you thought they meant it. Your memory works at odds with your heart, evoking memory of events that makes you sad or dour, and the ability to recollect at will becomes a truncheon with which you beat yourself. Angry at yourself, at them, at God, at love itself, sometimes you yell impotently into the heartless night for redress until too hoarse to speak and then sulk under the covers to a fitful repose. You remember them in your car, at places you went together, when others sound like them or use phrases they use, and so everywhere you turn you can't get away from the fact that they are gone. You throw away the list of things you planned to do together, and when you do them without that person, that empty chair beside you blows raspberries at your mind. The good times exist, but they are haunted by the juxtaposition of the fact that your beloved ultimately left, and so even though you want to enjoy your birthday, the fact that their birthday is in the same week as yours always dampens your joy and makes you wonder how they are and if they think of you. Sometimes the warm memories only make you think you were happy, sort of like how alcohol tricks you into thinking you are warm. Eventually, you either throw away or box up all the things from your courtship, take down and/or delete the pictures and wonder why you thought it would or could work in the first place. You couldn't possibly have known with certitude that this would happen, but you feel like you ought to have known better and screwed your courage to the sticking place against the inevitable siege on your mind. You remember that you thought you were happy once, that they actually meant what they said, and then you remember that they're telling that to someone else now, and you hope that they're not lying to that person too.
Every woman I ever considered as a partner eventually moved on; none of them ever came back yet, and sometimes I honestly wonder if it would have been better for me if I never met them at all. I ache for the last one EVERY DAY. She was the only one I ever really loved and the only woman I ever met who truly seemed willing and able to be a partner to me. It was ok to be me. We had a song. We had a plan. We had some problems, but she seemed likely to succeed, and if we could not make it, then how would anyone else ever stand a chance? Enough time passed that I went back and listened to "our song" again, and it brought back a flood of memories and emotions. Love songs only really seem to make sense when you are actually in love. The rest of the time, you change the station when they come on, because they don't apply to you, make sense to you, or even appeal to you. You know you're in love when you feel like they're talking to you, expressing your thoughts, sensitive to and aware of your situation, and so you turn to them. Was their heart ever really mine? Was our love real? When I remember, am I remembering truth? Could we have been happy? Is she happy? What makes me unworthy of being the choice of a choice woman? I am very popular with women over the age of 50 and with girls under the age of five. I know I'm awesome. What's wrong? How do I get rid of the pain? If I had never loved at all, I would still know pain, but it would be a different kind. I don't know what kind, but I know I don't like this dull ache that throbs in my heart every day and darkens my expectations and hopes and challenges my continence. I don't like being cynical and bitter, and I fear that my Sunday School class will be jaded by my experiences and perspective. I gave a woman real love, true love, and let her break my heart. I know she probably didn't intend to hurt me, but she hurt me despite her hopes. It's painful, which might be why most people don't really open up, take a risk and offer what love really means. When you love someone, you want what is best for them with an eye single to God's glory. It's rare. It stays rare because more often than not it's not returned or rewarded, and that's painful. The problem is not with pain, it's with love, because in order to love you must make yourself sufficiently vulnerable to be more sensitive and accessible to pain.
