I have these unwanted feelings for someone. We have amazing conversations. She is funny, smart and beautiful. But she has a boyfriend and I don't know what she sees in him. I think I could treat her better, make her happier. I think what we had was much more natural, while with him it is more forced. But I can see why she is with him and how he makes her feel when she looks at him and smiles. So why can't I let this go?
WARNING: This turned into a bit of a ramble.
A while ago, I started to fall for someone. It's not a feeling I've ever had before and it is not a fun feeling. I don't know the reason why this occurred, but it shoudn't have. She has a boyfriend and they love each other and they get on well together. Their values and what they want from their relationship long term are perfectly in line.
When I first met her, I didn't like her that much. I thought she was a bit socially akward and not that attractive. We became friends as we had a shared hobby and for a long time I never saw her as more than a friend. But one day when we were just hanging out, something that I can't explain happened and I started to like her in a different way. I don't know what it was, why or how it happened. It came out of nowhere. Although I didn't know it at the time, I think that was the day I started to fall for her.
Although I never dated her, I could count the time I spent with her among the happiest days of my life. She always knew what to say to inspire me and make me work harder on overcoming my obstacles in life. I always try to be myself, but I've been told that I'm a bit of a dick by a lot of people. This would put me on guard at all times around other people, but I always felt like I could be fully myself around her. Just being close to her made me feel more hopeful and positive about life, it was like my mood was elevated when we were together, the world seemed like a better place.
I would occassionally let my mind wander to how we would be as a couple. I felt that we had such a natural connection that it would work well, even her boyfriend had said more than once that he could see us being together. I felt she would compliment my life and that we would work well together to push each other forward and become better people. We always seemed to know what the other meant in conversation. I was grateful that I had met her. I've never felt this way about anyone before and I've certainly never had feelings like this develop so quickly.
There came to be this moment of realisation and acceptance where I knew I had to get over this, but I couldn't. I thought the best thing I could do was seperate myself from her. Not because I wanted to, but because I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought it would be more emotionally healthy for me. So it started off completely fine. I was logical, rational. She lived with her boyfriend in a great flat. I had to move on. By the time I had applied for a new job in another town and looked at a new place to live, I felt terrible. As I started to pack my things I felt numb. I couldn't even believe I was feeling this way. I'd thought about it because I thought it was the right thing but in that moment I was freaked out. I wanted to tell her that I cared about her but I didn't want her to have to fabricate or manufacture a response or feel guilty. I wanted to give her a hug and a kiss and tell her how I felt, but I didn't want to damage their relationship.
I have moved around a lot in my life and I have never stayed in one place for more than 2 years since I was about 16. I was kicked out and didn't speak to my family for over 8 years before the gap was eventually healed and even now it is on thin ice. This means that I have very little concept of what 'home' is. I didn't realise until I decided to move away from her, that it was when I was with her that I felt like I had come home.
The numbness stayed with me for a couple of hours, until that night. That's when the numbness shifted into loneliness and sadness and even though I had planned to pack, I couldn't bring myself to do anything but sit there. I tried to process my feelings in my head over and over again, but I just sat there for about 10 minutes in silence, thinking about everything I felt, everything that I regretted. I felt miserable. There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt that, even though I knew I was doing the right thing, I felt incredibly sad because I wouldn't be able to spend time with her anymore.
A couple of days went by and I eventually told my best friend about my feelings for her and he was brilliant. He took me on nights out, we did all the things I liked, he tried to keep me busy but in-between these events this feeling came back. I kept thinking of her and eventually I went to her facebook, which was the dumbest thing I could ever do. I went to her facebook and before I could even scroll down, I saw a picture of her that I hadn't seen before. It was of her looking beauitful, enjoying one of her hobbies with her boyfriend. I immediatly closed my internet browser but not before my adrenaline shot through the roof, my blood pressure started pounding, I felt my heart beat, I found myself getting angry and jealous and my head just started to go into these crazy spirals.
I couldn't believe myself. I was angry at myself. I felt silly that I wanted to feel upset. I wondered when the picture was taken. I started comparing myself to her boyfriend and started imagining how I was going to become better in all the ways that matter to me. I was going to be better at my job, I was going to work harder at the gym, I was going to get more talented at music, I was going to become a better friend, a better person, travel more, become more world aware. I was comparing myself to her boyfriend, I was in a death fight with him in my head.
Five minutes later I realised, what the hell am I doing? But I couldn't snap this streak. For the next day and the next couple of days I felt divided. Every time I was with my friends I was wondering, what is she doing now? Sometimes I wished that she wasn't having a good time. I imagined that she would be having a better time if I were with her. I started wondering what she was doing, comparing my life to hers, it became impossible to live my life in a happy way. That's where my head was at the time.
I still had to work, I still had to focus. So I started doing whatever I could to sort my head out. I studied human psychology and I created a list of mental exercises that I had to do. A few days later I saw on her facebook another photo I hadn't seen before. It was of her with her boyfriend and she was wrapped around him with the biggest smile I'd ever seen on her face. Suddenly, all I could think about in that moment was how grateful I was to her boyfriend for making her smile so big.
That for me was a complete plot twist. I didn't see it coming because last time I had seen a photo like this, I had gotten sad and retreated into myself. I started to worry about how things affected me and what I realised that I needed to do, was get to a point where I could share in the happiness of other people even when I didn't nesessarily feel it.
Even though I had strong feelings for her, I had a very limited concept of what this meant. When I was frozen in silence that other night, I wanted her close to me. I wanted her to know that I cared. I wanted to make her happy. When I spent time with her, this made me a better person because I was learning how to make her and other people happy, but it also made me very self-centered in where her happiness came from.
When I saw the first facebook photo, I realised that I wasn't happy that she was happy. I was jealous and upset that she was happier with someone else. I later found out that the photo was taken a long time before I even developed feelings for her and this entire episode in my head was completely manufactured. I couldn't be happy for her at the time, because I felt I should be the one to make her happy.
I've never been in Love but I've always thought that Love means that you need each other. If she was happy without me around then she didn't need me. I had become stuck in a negative spiral where I was trying to figure out for myself what these feeling were and if she felt the same. The only way I could have pursued that would have been to potentially damage a wonderful relationship. That sounded too screwed up to be Love and would have guranteed pain for everyone involved. So whatever those feelings were, I decided it wasn't Love.
I tried to date other girls. I've dated 3 different girls since I fell for her but not one of them worked out. The weird thing is I feel bad for them, because I know deep down if she approached me and wanted to be my girlfriend, I would drop my current interest like a sack of bricks. I felt like I was trying to fill a hole with someone else, a hole that only she could fill. No one could measure up to her.
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I came to realise that I wanted her to be happy, no matter what. I saw that photo of her, with a smile on her face and felt glad that she was happy. I was grateful to whoever it was in her life, family, friends or her boyfriend that were making her feel that way because I cared about her and I couldn't personally make her feel that way.
I thought if she did care about me, she wouldn't want me to be stressing in silence, she would want me to be happy. I wanted that for myself too so I decided not to think about her anymore and hoped to start feeling better immediatly. This didn't diminish how I felt about her or how important she was to me, it was just the right thing to do. I kept telling myself I should feel this way, but then I'd imagine her with her boyfriend and that was not how I felt. Immediatly, my feelings came back and I would be jealous. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could get my head into the right place.
In order for things to work between two people, they need to feel loved. It's human nature. Babies, if they aren't shown affection, will literally die. Humans thrive on the affection and the love of other people. If they don't get it, their lives go out of sequence. Everything starts to break down. Their health breaks down, they start being mean to other people, they stop achieving their goals. They need to feel affection.
Well-being is kind of like a table. As long as it's supported by legs, it's fine. So what people spend a lot of time doing in their lives is finding support. They have friends supporting them, making them feel loved. They have family who make them feel loved. They have a girlfriend or boyfriend who makes them feel loved. Everyone has different ones. I tried to think about what my legs were. What provided that sense of love, that sense of well-being for me. It cerainly wasn't family due to past events and I can't honestly say I've truely 'been in Love' with any of my girlfriends. There were some girls that I cared about a great deal, but that's not the same. I'd been single for a long time too, so it would be my friends. The problem is that these legs are unstable. Life happens. One leg disappears and the table will topple. Your life goes to shit. You no longer feel good. You no longer feel fond of the people around you. You become bitter. You become not very nice, not very concerned with how things are going for others.
Most people, when they loose one of those legs and the table becomes slanted, they spend more time with the other supporting factors until the lost leg can be replaced. After a month or so, they are completely back to normal because they've built another leg there or they've strengthened some of the other legs. That's great, but it doesn't solve the problem that the table is so wobbly because the legs underneath it are not certain.
I've only had one leg or sometimes no legs at all for my table most of my life. The truth of life is, people will die. Girlfriends or boyfriends will leave. Friends will leave. Even friends whom I thought I would be friends with for a long time are no longer in contact with me. So the legs are always shaking. What people try to do, is re-enforce those legs. They need to find that feeling of well-being again. They need to lock the legs in. They try to build braces around the legs.
These braces can take the form of different things for different people. For some it can be threatening. Like one of my ex-girlfriends saying if I left her, she would cut herself. I figured that she was saying this because it made her feel certain that I wouldn't ever leave her. I had a different way of building braces. I would try to make myself very important to that person. I'd focus on self-improvement and self-development. A lot of situations in my life, particually with girls that didn't work out, I would look back and think, how can I avoid this happening again? So I would work on myself. I'd make myself stronger. I'd make myself more fun to be around. I'd make myself more critically important. I'd make myself better at making people happy in order to ensure that the people most important to me stay in my life.
But life happens. It doesn't matter how important I am to someone, life can be complicated. That's when these braces become negative. Like this girl and her boyfriend. Rather than being just happy for them because they are amazing together, when I think about it I find myself being negative. I'm not concerned about how happy they are together, I'm concerned about how it affects me. I was so concerned with making her happy when she was around me that when other people did it, like her boyfriend, that would threaten me and make me feel useless and invisible. That's why her facebook photo affected me so dearly at first.
I realised that every support in your life that comes from someone else is unstable. No matter how good your friends, family or loved ones are, you will be insecure for the rest of your life as long as you rely on them. If you think this way, you will constantly be seeking security. But I had spent most of my life without those things, so I knew there was only one solution. That is to build yourself not a leg, but a pillar coming up from the ground through your well-being table that is supported by you. I believe the correct term for this is self-respect.
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I didn't know about the character limit... But basically my question is:
How can I deal with this girl, this friendship and my feelings for her in a way that's acceptable or do I need to filter this person and this relationship out?