Raise your hands!
We all know this one person. This is the person who we practically devoted ourselves to just so they could be happy even though it meant compromising our own personal happiness. This is the person some of us may have put our dreams on hold for; just because we were led to believe that this was necessary in order to make things work. This is the person whose needs we always prioritized over our own because we were young, stupid, and selfless like that.
This is the person who led us to believe that forever was possible even though there was never any reason to believe so. We all have that one person that we wasted too much time on; the person we don’t want to ever deal with again throughout the rest of our lives.
I had this one person who I gave my all to. Things started out in a typical romantic sense. There was no reason for me to doubt his intentions. There was no reason for me to think that he wouldn’t treat me the way that I deserve to be treated. There was no reason for me to believe that things would turn out the way that they did. I had so much hope for him. I had so much hope for us. He was very sweet and kind.
He even seemed kind of shy and I found that adorable. He always knew the right words to say whenever I needed him to talk. And he also always knew whenever he just needed to stay quiet and listen to me. He was good. He knew what he was doing. He won me over and it was beyond my control. I fell for him and I fell for him really hard.
So then we get into the relationship and we start getting comfortable with one another. Little did I know that it would be our comfort for one another that would eventually lead to our demise. He started becoming complacent in the relationship. It was okay, I thought to myself. Maybe this was normal behavior for all couples in relationships that started to go steady. I believed that maybe things would start picking up again eventually and I just had to stick things out. And yes, things did pick up. He would give me a taste of his sweetness and his romantic self.
And I would find myself falling for him once more. But then he would retreat back into his little shell or emotional cocoon. He would just stop for a while and I would be left puzzled. I didn’t know at the time that this would be a start of an endless cycle that would later on come to define our relationship. If only I had known back then how things would turn out, I would have walked out of the relationship earlier. But I was too blinded by my love. I was deluded by my own optimism. My own feelings betrayed me.
He kept me on the leash for the longest. He gave me the kind of relationship that I wanted at times but it wasn’t the one I needed. He was there for me whenever he would feel me start to slip away, but then when he had me safe and secure, he would revert back into his cold and unfeeling self. I hated it and I loved it at the same time. I hated the inconsistency and the insecurity of what we had. But I loved all the little happy moments that we would share; the ones that were way too few and far between. I was hooked on this relationship that was bad for me. I was addicted to this love that wasn’t real. I wasted so much time on this romance that I knew wouldn’t last.
Eventually, I grew up and I realized that enough was enough. I learned to put myself above the relationship. I learned that it was okay for me to be selfish. I thought that it was okay for me to go after the kind of love that I thought I really deserved. I didn’t know what that kind of love looked like but I knew for sure that it wasn’t what we had together. And by the time that I had finally developed the strength and the resolve to actually end things and call it quits.
I had lost so much time already. This was time that I could have used to build myself to become a better person. This was time that I could have used to be in love with the right person. This was time that I could have used to build a better life for myself and for the people I loved. But instead, I wasted it on you. And it was just far too much time.
