LOVE
Love is an interesting concept. I decided to trust her and open my heart to her, to share my feelings, my insecurities, my desires. "Never contact me again," she e-mailed. And I never heard from her again. The actions of my ex-girlfriend were so painful that I struggle to make sense of them. I've come to accept that I'll never know why. For a long time I devoured literature to come up with different theories to explain her behavior and to make some sense of it all. I certainly couldn't have been perfect in the relationship; perhaps my emotional reserve came across as controlling and she genuinely doesn't like me... I was slow and dense to accept this.
In the end, I reject all the theories. I'll just never know. And perhaps this is the crucial lesson, to accept experiences and suffering as ultimately unknowable and based on subjective contact with the senses. Whatever the explanation, I've learned that the only purpose of a relationship is to support another person to reach their highest potential, not to project unresolved emotional baggage onto another, which translates into forms of manipulation and emotional abuse based in desire. Desire for what? Desire for what we lacked as children. At the time I didn't understand that because I had low self-esteem and wanted to believe that when my girlfriend told me that she loved me it meant love in the substantive sense of nonjudgmental compassion. I accept that all experince is subjective. I extend compassion. I release the illusion of love.
