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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However, today at lunch I finished Steve Pavlina’s book, “Personal Development for Smart People”, and its final chapter is about spirituality. And I liked his definition of it: your beliefs about how the universe works and about your purpose/role in life. From that, I can proceed.

Current Status:

As I said in the beginning (what, you haven’t run away yet?), I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in any god or gods, or in anything supernatural; not out of any “dogmatic materialistic belief”, but simply because I, like Carl Sagan, believe “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. If you tell me you have a dog at home, I’ll believe you without evidence, but if you tell me you have a dragon at home, I’ll demand evidence; in the absence of it I’ll think you’re either lying or crazy. And no supernatural “event” has ever had any more evidence than “so and so saw” or “so and so wrote”, which amount to mere hearsay, even if it happens to have been written millennia ago. I’m not closed-minded; it’s just that, to paraphrase Sam Harris, my beliefs scale with the available evidence. If there’s none, there’s no belief – always keeping an open mind to any evidence in the future, of course. But so far there has been none.

Contrarily to what many believers claim about atheists, my life isn’t depressive, hopeless, grey or nihilistic; not believing in an eternal soul or an afterlife makes my life more precious, not less.

But talking about my beliefs, or promoting atheism, reason and skepticism, isn’t the purpose of this blog. All of the above only had two points: to show how my atheism isn’t a “problem”, isn’t making me unhappy, or limiting my personal growth; and to allow me to talk about “spirituality” without having my readers think I’m a “true believer” or a new age mystic. I’m not either.

To me, the universe is a fascinating, mostly unknown (but not unknowable) place. Being alive and allowed to learn, to discover, to develop your knowledge, to find out how things work is exhilarating. Unlike some (the kind who complained about Newton “unweaving the rainbow”), I don’t make a virtue of not knowing, but I look at that as the beginning of a trip, with the anticipation and the excitement of so many new things to experience and learn ahead. A mystic will either claim (permanent) perfect ignorance or perfect knowledge; I, on the other hand, treat lack of knowledge as the beginning of a new adventure. And in this respect I couldn’t ask for more.

As for my purpose in life… I don’t know.

Really. And I admit it readily, without shame or embarrassment.

I don’t think it’s unknowable to me, though. I believe it’s something I’ll find out eventually. In fact, I expect this blog to help me in that respect (as with many others).

Goals:

To discover / determine my “purpose in life”, and realize – or make sure – that it’s a good one.

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