I’ve tried to rob so many people of their soul mate by simply not acknowledging that what is not mine will never be mine.
There is one tenant of my personality that has never swayed. I get things done. Drive 36 hours straight from Mississippi to PA because I got stuck in a blizzard on a shut down highway for 10 hours? Piece of cake. Pull an all-nighter to study for a corporate tax final because I worked back to back 14 hour shifts at the bar the nights before? Couldn’t be easier. Go two days a week, every week for an entire summer without sleep so that I could horse show in OH and bar tend in PA? Could do THAT in my sleep. Clock out at 100hr/week for 3 months in a row? Fuck it, make it 6 months.
I get shit done.
That has always been one of my biggest points of pride. Some people call it work ethic and, while that might be, that side of me extends past work and into most interactions I have with humans that I care about. Therein lies one of the (many) flaws that I have when it comes to dating.
I get lucky a lot because when a relationship is in its first stages, I am very attuned to red flags and I get the fuck out of there without hesitation or regret. But once a relationship has reached the point where I have invested time and emotion, that aggressive “you’re out of here,” behavior I have when I see red flags in the beginning becomes an even more aggressive, “LET’S FIX THE FUCK OUT OF THIS.” When I reach that point in a relationship, I see every red flag that pops up as a challenge that I can overcome by simply working on myself, becoming more loving, attentive, caring so that I can use the newly birthed “Soft Maia” to manipulate the other person into changing whatever it is in them that I see as a red flag. Manipulation is unhealthy, so maybe that’s the wrong word, or maybe it is right and I love using the puppy-eyed Maia that develops to get what I want. I’ll tell ya what, though, it NEVER works. When it does work, it is a short-term change, because at the end of the day you can’t change someone, at least not someone who isn’t fully ready to make that change out of their like/love/respect for you.
So what do I do? I see that the changes aren’t happening but Soft Maia is already awake (lol). When it comes to the way I act in real relationships, the loving/caring person that comes out isn’t fake, she isn’t forced, she’s 3,000% real. So my walls are down, I’ve essentially rearranged my life to do what I can to make the other person happy because I care about them but I’m not getting the same effort in return, because why would they? They’ve presented their red flags either subconsciously or consciously and through their actions have shown me how much they care, or don’t. And here is where the battle between Hard Outer Shell Maia and Soft Maia erupts and where rational Maia gets completely fucked. Hard Outer Shell Maia gets angry that she’s not getting what she wants and she’s embarrassed by the amount of effort Soft Maia has put in to no avail, so she starts sabotaging. Hard Outer Shell Maia starts making constant passive aggressive comments when things bother her; she’s petty and sometimes cruel. And this is when things start to go downhill; the relationship will be sustainable now for only until the other person leaves, which is always drawn out because of the juxtaposition of how loving the Soft and emotional Maia is.
In the background, waiting it out, there is Rational Maia. She waits until the end and then concentrates on every red flag that she/I/we knew was there. She puts together hundreds of scenarios for me to go over in my mind of why the relationship was never going to work anyway based off of the big, core differences that were the basis of the red flags. She reminds me that something that was not meant for me will never be mine and that it would never matter how much I work at a relationship; if it isn’t meant for me, then it won’t be mine. She reminds me that it doesn’t matter how much time and effort I put in, love isn’t an even exchange of goods; there is no guarantee I’ll get back what I give. She reminds me that (and this one I’ve learned over and over again and it has yet to stick) second chances work out sometimes, but they DON’T work out if it’s a second chance you worked for when there are TWO people in the relationship that need to pull weight (or 4 if you count all 3 Maia’s).
I believe in vulnerability, I believe in putting yourself out there and I believe in saying what you need to say. These things have their place in a relationship. But I don’t believe they have a place afterwards. Personally, I need to get much better at being transparent proactively so that Soft Maia doesn’t come in after the relationship ends with all her “BUT WHAT-IFs!!?!?!?!” When something ends, it ends for a reason and nine times out of ten, that reason doesn’t exist to simply set you up for your second chance at the same song and dance.
Looking back on my most recent relationship, I think about how self-righteous I was. All the fights I caused because I wanted to see change didn’t do a goddamn thing but cause both of us unhappiness. I could sit all day and say that the range of tiny fuckin’ things to large scale issues I blew up about really were issues, but were they issues that needed to be argued about? No.
In those moments, I had two options:
- 1) realize the long-term results of my actions would result in the disintegration of my relationship and find a different way to deal with them
- 2) OR realize that all the issues I had in that relationship weren’t things that needed to change or be worked on; they were really signs that no matter what I chose to do I was just in the wrong place with the wrong person.
Relationship Post Mortem:
I can see that now, clearly. Hindsight is 2020 I guess, but what I did was rob both myself and the other person of time. The only resource you can never replenish. For a long time now I’ve been selfish and blind. My happiness is what I care about but my history has shown that I will choose to be unhappy and to work relentlessly to fix something that shouldn’t be fixed (and during the course of that, I will cause others unhappiness), as if the completion of the task at hand would be what brings me to my end goal of happiness. It is nearly impossible for me to accept “defeat,” to see what is in front of me and say “my happiness should not be linked to him, his life is not for me, my happiness is out there and there is someone else whose life and love I will share and the only way to do that is to let go and move on.” Because instant gratification, right? The idea that my happiness could be RIGHT HERE if only this person would transform into a different version of themselves for me. And making that transformation happen seems easier to do in the moment than to lose someone that I love and care about by acknowledging that maybe this just isn’t it.
& In The End:
I have loved a lot of men in my life, whether or not it was ever spoken. I’m not afraid of it; I know what it is to wish you had said it more to someone you’ll never have the chance to say it to again. But the scariest part of knowing that you love someone or care deeply about them is understanding that there might come a time when you have to do that from afar. That the person you spent every day with might soon become a stranger BECAUSE you loved or cared for them deeply. That is what hurts, that is what causes rational Maia to stand in the background and let me drag things out.
But truly, the most selfish AND selfless thing you can do is let go. Let yourself find what is meant for you instead of holding on, so tightly, to someone that has been leaving from the moment you met to find what was meant for them.