Love Without the Relationship

One begins to notice a certain pattern in these things.

The greatest love stories, it seems, are never allowed their completion. It is a strange and recurring tragedy. When a boy loves a girl, his love is often a solitary star in the sky of her indifference. Should they both find love in one another, a third shadow inevitably falls across their path. If it is not the shadow of another person, it is that of their families, or of circumstance, or of some unnamed force that seems to delight in the fracturing of beautiful things. I have seen it time and again: the most fantastic love stories never get fulfilled.

And yet, herein lies the paradoxical joy of love itself. It is a feeling of a different order. You find you do not want someone "better," nor even someone like her. Your entire being gravitates toward a single, irreplaceable soul. You want only her. This singular, irrational focus this profound orientation of the self toward another is perhaps the most romantic thing the human heart can experience.

I am 21, and I believe I have felt this. She is not with me anymore she left. But my thoughts have not yet learned how to leave her. People offer their gentle wisdom, murmuring that I will move on, that time will heal everything. But I don't think so. I am not even certain what this "moving on" truly means. Perhaps I will marry someone else one day, build a life, find a different kind of peace. But that does not mean the love I hold for her will cease to exist. It will simply be. So what, then, does it really mean to move on? Is it to forget, or merely to build a new world around the ghost of the old one?

Our story, too, followed that ancient, tragic arc. In the beginning, there was a certain joy that hung in the air between us. Then, familiarity settled in, and with it, a casualness that slowly eroded the magic. Then things got worse. Now she is gone, and all that remains is the memory of her, a space she once occupied. In the end, it is always the one who loved the most who suffers the most.

Through this, I believe I have learned a fundamental truth: breakups happen within a relationship, which is a construct of time and presence.

"But in love, which is an internal state of being, there is no concept of a breakup."

If you truly love someone, the only thing that matters is the simple fact of their happiness. That is the whole of it. If they are happy, you are happy. Yes, you may feel the ache of your own loneliness when they are not with you. You will feel the hurt for yourself. But to see them joyful, truly joyful, is to feel a quiet, secondary happiness bloom within your own pain.

Has anyone ever loved someone in this way? Truly? Unconditionally? I think I have. She is not with me, but I am happy for her. At least she is happy. Even without me, she is happy. Of course, I would be happier if she were happy with me, but the fact that she is not does not alter the nature of the love. It only alters the nature of my own life.

Perhaps this is all just the venting of a wounded mind, but I feel as though life is simply going on and on, pulling me with it. For months now, I have not been living, only existing. The joy has been drained from the simplest acts I eat, I work, I sleep, but I am merely performing the gestures of living. Since she left, I cannot even picture the face of another girl. My mind has sealed that door. There is only her memory, and a self-hatred that asks, again and again, what I did to cause this ending. I carry the blame because she is not here to share it.

And still, people fall in love. When you examine it with cold logic, there is no benefit to loving someone like this. It is a path of immense vulnerability and potential pain. But we still do it. Why?

Because this is the most fantastic thing a human can ever do.