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(note: this is a comment on this post, to clarify my position on letting go of people who left us and whom we still love / are obsessed with – usually ex-spouses.)
Being still in love with someone who has long left us and moved on with their life is something most of us have been through, or are still going through. I can’t claim any special “wisdom” here, but I’d like to talk about what worked for me. Your own solution surely was or will be different from mine; still, I hope you may be able to use something from here, even if in some way I can’t anticipate.
As I said in the post, my solution wasn’t easy; I had to erase — as much as possible, and in a brutal, merciless way — something that had long been a part of me, and which is a part of everyone, to different degrees: wishful thinking. The books I mentioned helped a lot, in different ways: Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" and, especially, "Atlas Shrugged" made me realize that wishing doesn’t make it so, that I had to develop, above all things, and with the utmost urgency, a "worship" of reality. The more your thoughts and beliefs are in accordance with reality, the less you are a victim of yourself due to your own self-deceit.
This is harder than it sounds. After all, you may ask, isn’t “make-believe” for children? Don’t we, as adults, live in the real world? But we grow up with a tendency to easily believe in what we wish was true, no matter the facts. We adopt that belief as a part of us, something to be cherished and protected, even in the face of contradictory facts. And the more we resist reality, the more we tend to resist it in the future, because we’ve invested more and more in our comfortable fantasy, whether it’s “deep down, she really loves me and will one day realize that and come back” or “there is a good, all-powerful being who loves me and watches over me”. Both are exactly the same: wishful thinking. You want it to be true, therefore you believe it.
I’ve been there. Admitting that my ex-wife really didn’t love me anymore, never would again, and, not only that, she had changed for the (far) worse and was no longer the amazing, wonderful, brilliant, loving person she had been five years ago, was one of the most difficult, most painful times of my life. It was also what saved that life, in the long run.
Incidentally, Douglas Adams’ “The Salmon of Doubt”, or, more precisely, this interview with him, included in the book, similarly forced me to painfully abandon another cherished belief, because it contradicted reality, and, rationally, one must never put anything above reality, no matter how comfortable; that way lies only self-deception and powerlessness. So, after more than two decades of Christianity, I was suddenly an atheist – and, since then, I’ve never felt more free, because I wasn’t deceiving myself anymore. But, at the time, it was hard.
I realize that this will probably not help most people in this situation who may read it; I am suggesting fighting the wrong emotions and wishful thinking with reason and love of truth, while I guess most people would fight emotions with other emotions, or alternatively would just surrender to them (“I’ll always love her, no matter what, and I won’t ever love anyone else”). As I said, this is what worked for me. If I had simply tried to “drown” my lost love by trying to replace it with someone else, I’d probably still be, almost 10 years later, waiting for my “true love” to “come to her senses” ("any day now", I’d tell myself), while being alone and miserable all the time, and with absolutely no self-respect or self-esteem. Sorry, but I’ll take reality – no matter how harsh — above comfortable, apparently pleasant wishful thinking any day. I really hope this post, while not solving anyone’s problem, at least leads someone to look at things from a different angle; sometimes, it’s just the little push we need.
And for any religious readers, I’m sorry if this post offends you — it shouldn’t, because we shouldn’t confuse ourselves with our ideas or beliefs, but I know it happens a lot –, but that wasn’t my intention; I simply wanted to give an example of defeating harmful wishful thinking through "reality worshipping" in my life that wasn’t related to love and relationships (to show how it applies to other areas of life), and that was the best one available.
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Tags: Letting go, Reality
Allow me to point out, and this is just a thought – given I don’t know the situation first hand (nor do I want to), I don’t think your wife changed for the worse. I’ve worked along psychologists for 10 years, reading psychological evaluations on a daily basis and am very interested in the subject to the point of planning to change my career in the short term, and thus I am telling you, it is extremely rare that someone would change their personality like that. If you look back at yourself, you will see that the core of you has been the same throughout the times and you’ve only gone through some minor changes. I know that it amazes me when I look back at who I was at 5 or 10 or 15 and I still find that I am the same person.
Could it be that you had a rose tinted view of her and then reality set in? I know my ex was a bastard when we broke up, which I’d never expected of him, but nowadays I’ve forgiven him and I would still say he is a decent enough bloke, to the point that I would recommend him to any other woman. At the time of our break up I was so appalled at his behaviour that it was easier to label him as a bastard and stick him with that label for a while longer so that I felt justified in our break up.
Nowadays, that I am older, wiser (all right, all right, stop with the snickering
) and find myself repeating the same mistakes in my current relantionship, I realise how difficult it must be to live with someone like me and how I push people’s buttons to the brink of madness. It must’ve been very difficult for my ex to deal with me and we were both far too imature and inexperienced to be able to work things through. Alas, in mine eyes he turned into a completely different person at the time. The truth was, I’d never seen him turn into that person because perhaps none of us had gone through such a grieving experience as a break-up from a serious relationship. I don’t think he will turn into that person many more times in his life, hopefully he will be older and wiser and will be able to deal with things better if it came to that.
At the time it helped me to think he was the one who’d changed, and for the worse, in order for my self-protection system to kick in. It was not good for me and therefore I would not want it for myself – that tends to be the defense mechanism I use and it’s been useful so far, I have a very high sense of self-preservation.
But nowadays, I know better and I love my bf even more for being able to love me despite my being a bitch and a bully sometimes on top of all my finer qualities. Slowly and with his help, I am becoming a better person and so is he, but then again, we have both been in former relationships and have hopefully derived some knowledge from that.
< /end long rant
Sara,
what you say is certainly a possibility. It’s true that most people don’t really change, deep inside; it’s also possible that we look at them through rose-tinted glasses when we have feelings for them, and we remove those glasses when those feelings aren’t there anymore.
However, just because most people don’t change, it doesn’t mean that none ever do. I do think she changed, in many ways. I won’t give any details here, because it’s off-topic for this post, because whether it happened or not doesn’t really change my point here, and also because I really don’t feel that using this blog to criticize a person is the right thing to do. Besides, it’s all a thing of the past.
Whether she changed or not, my point remains: believing, despite all the contrary evidence, that “deep inside she really loves me and will eventually open her eyes and return” is a soul-crushing piece of wishful thinking, to be fought at all costs. And our chief weapons (hmm, this sounds like Monty Python) are reason, self-esteem, and the “worship of reality” I mentioned.