Not In Love

Fair warning, this post is going to be a fair bit longer than my usual stuff, but I've got a few very important things to go over, so I hope you read it anyway.  My next post will be something brief and amusing, promise.

I have a confession to make.  Once or twice before on this blog, I've claimed to have straightened myself out emotionally.  The fact is, these posts were something of a front.  While I have dealt with some of my minor issues, I still ended up falling into the same destructive patterns and repeating my stupid mistakes.  This is why I'm finally owning up to the fact that I'm not quite as okay as I've tried to look here.  That being said, I am working on it, which is the main purpose of telling you all this. 

I recently got to a point where I realized that I'd become a metaphorical Dr. Frankenstein, trying to make dead things (in my case, relationships that didn't really exist) live again.  Not only that, but I was trying to drag many of my friends out to the graveyard to help me dig up the bodies.  What I forgot in my mad quest (hopefully I'm not overextending this metaphor) was that a dead body, no matter how great a specimen it was in life, is nothing more than a dead body, and should be left in the ground where it belongs.  

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I was being incredibly dramatic about all manner of things related to love, and lack thereof.  I took advantage of the kindness of my friends, always listening to their advice, but never following through on it.  While these things can't be undone, I feel awful that I became that sort of person.  Realizing what was happening, I decided to finally do something about it.  I have now made the decision to cut the drama out of my life, because at the end of the day, lying awake in the dark and listening to The Cure and moaning to my friends doesn't solve my problems.  

Recently, I started to think about Alex once again.  With some help from Baggage Reclaim (most notably this and this) I think I've finally started to move on and let go of this.  I'm sure I'm not completely over it yet, but I feel I've started to move in the proper direction instead of wallowing in my own delusions.  

I think the most important realization I've made is that what I had with Alex was not love, as much as I wanted it to be.  I found her very attractive, but nice pictures do not equal love.  Hearing about her sad past (which I will not divulge here, out of respect for her privacy) stirred feelings of compassion in me, but this still did not mean I was in love with her.  Small things she said made me smile, but being happy is not love.  At the moment, I'm not completely sure what is was we had together.  It was something like a friendship, and it could have grown into love, but the fact remains that what we had was not, in fact, love.  Even though Alex made me feel ways I'd never felt about anyone before, I think this comes down to a combination of good feelings about her and the fact that I really wanted to be in love.  My heart fooled itself into thinking there was more to the situation than a pretty girl who needed a friend.  It saddens me to think that I deluded myself in this way.  In spite of all this, I still care about Alex as a person, and there are times I wonder how she's doing, but it frustrates me that I'll most likely never know, and in time I'll forget about her entirely.