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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So far, I’ve reached all my goals and upheld all my decisions, except one: last dinner (just about an hour ago), I “got distracted” and ate too much – what would have been “normal” for me before I started all this. My habits, when I don’t think about it consciously, still lead me to fill the plate too much, and to eat everything on it, even if I’m already satisfied before I finish. I’ll have to pay more attention to that.

Tomorrow is housekeeper day, so I won’t have time to exercise in the morning; I’ll have to do it when I get home. I could get up earlier, but exercise makes noise, and I’d be waking up the neighbors, which is not nice (it’s for exactly that reason that I only open the windows in the room(s) where the birds are, as they have “morning calls” at first light, so I have to ensure that “first light” doesn’t come too early for them).

Even though I’m not noticing a big physical difference (I’ve lost some weight, but, as Mário said, it’s normal for that to happen in the beginning), I feel great, simply because I’ve made a decision – to improve my life –, and I’m sticking with it. This has been affecting other areas of my life as well, such as shyness and self-confidence; if I can do this, I can do anything. Starting this blog, so far, has been one of the best ideas I’ve had in my life, and I feel dumb for not doing it decades sooner (even before there was such a thing as a “blog”, in fact). But better late than never…

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So far, after 3 days, the main difference that I notice is that I feel wide awake during the entire day, which comes mostly from 1) sleeping well, and 2) not going to bed with a lot of alcohol in my system every evening (which also affects number 1). However, there’s also the psychological part, which is even more important: I feel that I have a purpose, and goals. That hasn’t been true for most of my life.

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Am I happy?

Like with many non-rhetorical questions, the answer is not simple. I could say “yes” and I wouldn’t exactly be lying… but nor would I if I answered “no”.

A common temptation when asked this question is to evaluate how good your life is, to add the good parts and subtract the bad parts, and to answer according to that. However, that is not the reply to the actual question; after all, I wasn’t asked how good my life was, was I? My happiness is certainly affected by my life, but, in fact, it’s inside me. I’m sure that there are many people with much better lives who are completely miserable, and there are also people who you might think have reasons to be suicidal, and yet are as happy as one can be.

You’ll note that I have so far avoiding answering my own question. But, tackling it now…

… No. Not really.

I’m not miserable, depressed or actually sad. I smile and laugh a lot each day, look forward to many things either in the immediate future or in a more distant one, and love to be alive. Yes, there are times when the simultaneous problems become too much for me to handle and I “panic”, but that doesn’t tend to last long (though girlfriends have suffered in the past for being close to me at those times…).

But I don’t have a lot of what I want, have a lot of problems I don’t want, and I’m disappointed in general with my life right now. I keep thinking to myself: it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not at my current age. I had always imagined me in a completely different situation: living with the love of my life, a kid or two, no money problems, perhaps my own business, and working at home (possibly in a much nicer place than the one I live in). Instead, I look at my life and, while the story is far from over yet, I see distinct signs of what can honestly only be called “failure”. And, no, I’m not blaming anyone (even “bad luck”) but myself. For details, see the entire “my baseline” series.

Now, by solving the problems and achieving the goals described in the rest of the series, I will certainly be a lot happier. Not because of material gains or “status” (I don’t really care about the latter, in fact), but because I will not be disappointed with myself. And I guess that’s the most important thing.

Still, it’s possible that I will also (above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak) have to revise my idea of “happiness”. Time will tell…

Goals:

If you guessed “to be happy”, give the man (or woman) a cigar.

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