- There will always be someone who can love you better
My first long-term breakup was a lesson in accepting the finite. For a long time, I thought if my relationship didn’t end in marriage and babies, that meant the relationship had failed, and I had put in far too much time, far too much love, and far too much of myself to fail. In both social psychology and economics, that’s called the sunken cost fallacy, and it’s exactly that, a fallacy.
I was essentially born with an inferiority complex, and here’s what I’ve learned- it doesn’t matter how good you are at something, because there will always be someone better than you, and someone worse than you. When you stop thinking about love so passively, and start thinking of it more of a verb, more actively, as an art perse, you will realize much of the same is true. Just like writing, baking, painting, there will always be someone better than you and worse than you. When you are in a good/or even bad relationship, and it ends, you’re initially crushed, but as months pass, if you give yourself the time and free-ness to experience it all, you may begin to see the beauty in it.
Although it once seemed impossible, there are things you are relieved to be rid of, things you wish had been different and now can be. Art gets better with every practice and so will each and every love, and one day you won’t miss the boy at 19, who was in a bad screamo band, never wrote you a love letter even though you wrote about him till your hands ached, and left old teabags on the counter. One day you will be held without worrying who else’s hands he’s touched. One day, you will be able to have communicative, and collected conversations without mistaking his hatred for passion, or his desire for perception as art.
It is okay if you don’t leave gracefully, it is okay if you went down grasping at his coattails. (I am about to get somewhat metaphorical and somewhat existential) It is okay that they did not realize you were an orb of energy so bright, beautiful and filled with love, that they could not hold you nor understand you, never feel bad. Most western men are socialized to empathize less and carry less emotional intelligence than women (see lemonade study) and are therefore less understanding of their own emotions (hence the sheer amount of avoidant men).
So, when you look back and think you were being gauche, dramatic, or deranged, realize that you would rather feel all your emotions magnified by 1000x than none at all.
Once you remember that our bodies are only stardust particles and that all the water in our bodies, all 75%, once lived in a cloud, his opinion of your words, in the grand scheme of things matters very little. You do not need to go with grace, because someday, every human alive will cease to exist and what he thought of you will no longer render any conscious mind, no matter how meticulous, in oral translation, as significant.
You do not need to go with grace, if he never led with love.
It is okay for them to be a lesson, not your future.
07/17/25 <3