The hardest thing to let go of is the love that was never truly yours. You can’t forget a person with whom you never had a real relationship. Because the question “What if…?” always remains.
“Almost relationships.” Regular hookups that never turned into anything more. An emotional affair where you knew there was something there but left it ambiguous. With all the “what ifs.”
The hardest relationships to forget are the ones that don’t really fit the definition of a real relationship, but that’s how it felt.
Because telling someone that those feelings were unjustified or unacceptable because things didn’t turn out the way you hoped is like telling someone who just got dumped that they shouldn’t be sad.
The only difference between these two types of relationships is some kind of label.
But judging someone’s feelings based on these labels is complete nonsense, because “I love you” still doesn’t lose its meaning.
Sometimes we fall in love with people who are not ours as much as we are theirs.
But we continue to love. Because there is a “what if” factor. “Maybe.” “Someday.”
The man leaves us with hope that we cannot let go of.
And these people haunt us for many years after such relationships.
In those moments when we wonder if there could still be something.
We hate ourselves for it, but we understand that if this person wanted us, we would let him take us, even despite the pain he caused.
When a real relationship ends, there is a strange sense of comfort that something has begun and ended.
But with other relationships, there is no such ending. We are left with all the feelings that were there; nothing goes away. We move on, but at any moment this person can come back into our lives, as he did before, and we are overwhelmed by all these feelings again.
You can’t forget a person with whom you never had a real relationship.
We just learn to live with this pain, which we have already become accustomed to.
