It Was Real for Me
Answering the question, “Did he ever really love me?”
When my husband divorced me, we continued to see each other as friends. His behavior clearly communicated to me both that he still cared about me and loved me, and that things between us had shifted irreversibly. The energy between us was palpably different, yet he still treated me with kindness and consideration. There was never any doubt in my mind that he had really loved me.
My last break-up has been a little different. My ex and I broke up about three years ago, yet the energy between us has only started to shift. Rather than a different energy coupled with kindness and consideration, I have experienced the same energy coupled with lack of kindness and lack of consideration. It has been very confusing for me. For years when I saw this ex, he would be as flirtatious with me as when we were together. What I thought was love would beam out of his eyes at me, and I would feel love for him. The love felt real, it felt the same as when we were in a committed relationship, and I would often think that we would end up getting back together, even though he was almost always in a committed relationship with someone else while he was flirting with me. I was wrong; we never got back together.
This spring I saw him. I still felt some of the old responses. All kinds of chemicals get released in my brain when I interact with him — I’m guessing a nice cocktail of oxytocin, endorphins, and adrenaline explains the heightened sensations of happiness and excitement. He picked a flower for me, then after our visit ignored my text messages. I was once again bewildered. There is such a disjoint between the love I perceive to be there when we’re physically present with each other and the lack of love I perceive in his actions and choices.
It made me doubt the years we were in relationship together — had he ever loved me?
If the look in his eyes that I had always thought of as love was still there even when he was treating me in a non-loving way, had it ever really been love? Maybe that’s just how his eyes look with everyone and I had been taking it too personally.
Then I remembered: the love I feel when we’re together is generated inside my body. Rather than feeling his love for me, I am feeling my love for him. Whether or not he “really” loved me doesn’t matter as much as that I authentically loved him. It was real for me. The love may have been based on something unreal — my projections and assumptions, for example — yet the love itself was real for me.
This realization opened the door to self-compassion. Instead of beating myself up for being so stupid as to believe this guy loved me as much as I had thought he did, I could feel that it was sweet that I did love him that much. Still ill-advised perhaps, still foolish, yet foolish is a softer word than stupid. Love can make people foolish. It did me. I didn’t know the person I fell in love with well enough. I attached myself to someone because I thought we were a match, yet time showed we weren’t. It happens all the time. This guy isn’t trying to be mean by fake-loving me when he sees me then real-ignoring me the rest of the time. It’s my love for him I’m feeling, not his love for me. He’s not fake-loving me, I’m real-loving him. When I remember that, it’s easier to understand the non-loving behavior that follows.
This guy may have loved me. He may still love me. He may have never loved me. He may be incapable of love. That’s not the important part of this equation. When I see him and still feel all the old love, I have to remember that it’s my love I’m feeling, not his. If I project it onto him, I’m making a mistake that will lead to further heartbreak.
I do suspect the love was real for him too. After years of flirting with me, then seeing me feel sad when flirtation didn’t lead to us getting back together, he has considerably cut back on the flirting. The energy between us has started to feel different to me as a result. It’s easier to remember when there’s less flirtation that the love I’m feeling is just what I’m feeling, rather than projecting it onto him and believing he’s feeling love for me.
At the end of the day, feelings of love don’t always add up to loving behavior, because everybody’s different. My ex may have thought he was being loving by flirting with me after our break-up, and it took a couple years of learning curve before he could realize that I considered flirting with me to be non-loving behavior when it was unaccompanied by any desire to get back together. Now that he knows, his behavior can more accurately reflect his desire not to hurt me. The gap between love and loving behavior is closing.
If you’ve ever been fooled in love, if you ever have wracked your brains trying to figure out how you can feel so much love from someone one minute then none the next, if you ever wondered whether the love was real, I encourage you to remember that the love you feel is your love for the other, not their love for you, and yes, it was real for you. Whether they loved you for real or not is unimportant compared to your ability to love them for real. Your heart works; you loved. To me, that seems way more important than wondering whether their heart was working during your relationship or not.
