Past imperfect

Over along period of time I have figured that there is only one way to get over a realationship and that is not to date anyone for a very long time. With a bad experience it is not so much getting over the person, it's getting to a place in which you have sufficiently recovered from the pain caused or at least, getting to a place in which you realise that you will never find the answer in anyone else. You cannot fully commit to another person whilst you have unresolved issues with another person.

There are times when you need to accept that you will never understand another person and no amount of understanding will make the carnage they inflict acceptable. The best place to be is to recognise that whatever the issues of another, there is no place for them in your life.

And this is where I got to a few months ago, the understanding that whilst I may have taken a disproprotionate amount of time trying to understand the issues of others, they were irrelevant. If I wasn't good for me it was time for a complete emotional disconnect.

And it's taken a long time to get here. To get to a place where I have no unresolved issues with a past partner. They don't need to be resolved since as relationships went, they sucked. None of them provided a feeling that I would ever want to feel again. All of them have served to warn me of the things I do not want to feel in a relationship. And to have them would make being single the only viable option.

And the irony is that this is the time that you meet someone, the time in which you are ready to love another wholeheartedly without any 'what if's' about anyone else. And for them to be in a place where they can truly love back. That said, it's not an easy path. People are frequently not conscious of their own emotional reactions, they don't necessarily have a full awareness of their own learned behaviour. I know without question that my emotional barriers can come up in an instant. My fight or flight mode is pitched higher than most people and with a history of relationships in which what people say being out of kilter with my gut instinct, it's going to be hard work for anyone to engender sufficient trust in me that I will commit whole heartedly.

And how do you ever really know if your gut instinct is telling you something you don't want to hear or if you are simply on red alert? It's an impossible question. And that's the thing about the future, you can only walk it with your eyes open and hope it's going in the direction you want it to. And you can only really do that when you have stopped looking back.