Hope is a strange thing. It’s a very powerful verb that depicts an action that is completely intangible, and yet it drives all of us everyday. From hoping to catch the bus on time to hoping you’ll finish the report early enough to hit the gym before Midnight. But there’s a difference between hoping something will happen and it actually coming true.
For instance, there’s the one guy who you’ve crushed on your entire life and when he finally makes a move on you, there’s some confusion as to whether he just wants to mark a notch on the bedpost or he really is interested in you. You find yourself sticking around too long only to discover that you instinctively knew the answer all along.
The hard part is admitting it to yourself.
How do you know when enough is enough?
We’d all like to believe that we’re so amazing that everyone wants to be with us. Well, everyone may want to sleep with our amazingness, but it’s not the fulfilling relationship we’ve hoped for. In most cases it may never become a meaningful relationship either. Denying that knowledge, we set ourselves up for drama, heartbreak and eventually painful reality. It would be easier to just acknowledge the situation is no good and move on. But we can’t. The masochist in us just can't let go. Or maybe it’s our determination to find someone to love us.
To accept the difference between reality and fantasy is hard to face. We lie to ourselves that the object of our affection will most definitely “wake up and smell the coffee” one day. And if we don’t lie to ourselves then we’re bound to feel the pain and hurt of the realization that someone we want to be with doesn’t want to be with us. Ouch! No one wants to feel that. It seems so much better to lie and make excuses. But what if they don’t wake up and notice how fabulous we are after several years of offering ourselves up? Wouldn’t acknowledging the truth of the situation make it that much easier to move on and find someone who cares equally for us? Who may even be standing right in front of us?
Sometimes lying to yourself does feel much better then acknowledging the truth. But you’re living a lie.
My best friend dated a guy for two years through some nasty knock down, drag out fights. She was so determined that her love could change him, and their relationship, and make him the man who could love her the way she needed to be loved. I, being the one on the other end of the phone listening to every day’s drama, made me realize that it was affecting my life and sucking the energy right out of me. So I told her that I didn’t want to hear anything more about him unless she was calling to say they had broken up. It’s easy to look from the outside in, the tough part is being in the thick of things and seeing the light.
Three months later my friend called to say that the relationship wasn't working anymore and it was time to call it quits, and she regretted hanging on for so long. But in the end she learned a lot about herself and what she’s looking for in a life partner. I felt deep relief on her behalf, and selfishly on mine, because I wouldn’t have to listen to her whining anymore. Action had finally been taken.
Maybe the solution comes from the “learn something” theory of dating. The idea that we can’t actually know what we’re looking for until we have put up with a bunch of B.S. that we really don’t want. For some reason we have to go through the worst, put up with the crummiest, disrespectful behavior and treatment before we can be confident enough to say “no more, I deserve better”.
I’d like to think that I kept a good head on my shoulders during a fairly recent up, down, string along dating episode, but I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. My hopes were wrapped up in something that deep down inside I knew, and understood, would never happen, but I denied it because I had hope, that nasty little bugger. It wasn’t until I admitted to the person I was with what I wanted, opened myself up to him, and received no positive answer in response that I realized that enough really is enough.
The downside is that life is short and the more time we waste in relationships that are going nowhere, if they’ve even started (that includes in our minds), the more time we lose living our lives, discovering more about ourselves, meeting personal goals and finding someone who doesn’t bring drama and trauma to our lives. We all deserve better.
• "Dating Games" appears first and third Mondays of every month, exclusively in Lumino Magazine. E-mail Jennifer at jenfort@hotmail.com.
