A few weeks ago, I have received an anonymous question that asked, “How can you tell if you’re in love with someone or if you’re just used to him or her?” My first thought? Well, shit.
I sat on this question for a while. In fact to this very day, I still do not know how to answer without evaluating my own credibility of making an attempt to respond. However, today, I thought about a “follow up” question to this particular dilemma.
“What if you stay with somebody you no longer love?”
Love and relationships are two completely different things. There are instances where two people are in love; yet, it’s without being labeled “In a relationship”. And on the other side of the spectrum, there’s a thing called - relationship without love (or maybe, not love just yet).
When you do find both and they do coexist, then you’ve got the perfect recipe. It might seem hard to find that, but the more and more relationships I’ve gotten into over the years, I realized, finding that is a lot easier than keeping that. Or at least what we thought was love.
But, what happens when we stay with somebody we fell out of love with?
As soon as you question your love for your significant other, it’s declaring a war, a battle between your heart and your mind. We stay with the people we are with because of many reasons.
From reasons being long years of history, or sharing a custody of your guy’s freaking toy poodle or even having to deal with “how are we going to split this TV”, breaking up is never an easy thing to go through. You think about all the pictures you have to delete, or worse, the ones you have to take down from your nightstand. You worry about the next time you run into his mom, or his aunt, or his uncle at Costco and dread the upcoming conversation and questions as to why you haven’t been around for the longest time. And that’s not everything. That’s just the gist of it.
Sometimes, you’ve been together for so long that each and every little thing just reminds you of him, good or bad. The relationship you are about to let go of is already instilled in every fiber of your being and in every little thing is infused in your environment one way or another.
But you can’t stay with someone you no longer love. It’s unfair to him, just as it’s unfair to you. You are depriving each other of something both of you deserve. If you stay with somebody you don’t love, you end up hating your situation. You end up being bitter towards them. And what’s worse than all of that? You start resenting yourself for not breaking up with them while it was early.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to make right out of the wrong things. But there’s also nothing right in forcing yourself in a love-less relationship. You deserve to be happy. He deserves to be happy. There’s no reason for two people, who both aren’t in love, be in a miserable relationship. That’s not what love is about. And there’s nothing reasonable for making him feel as if you are still there one hundred if you aren’t. Everyone deserves so much more than that.
Sometimes, we just need to realize that there are things that are meant to let go of. We need to acknowledge that some things aren’t for us. Remember, “Letting go doesn’t always mean you are giving up, but rather accepting that there are things that aren’t meant to be”.