A big part of where I'm coming from on this one can be found the lengthy OP of a thread on another forum (especially the "you are not a unique snowflake" and Rule #1 portions).
See, this is what I have a problem with. I don't regard relationships as a social convention. I'm not content to say that there should be rules for how you should feel and when you should move on, or at least not rules that are based on the simple idea of "relationship". I think that far more important than the concept of a relationship are the feelings shared and the emotional framework built between two people. Two people who are/were deeply in love should be held to different standards than people who just dated for a few months but never really envisioned themselves together forever. Or even people who dated for years but their feelings were never that strong. I'm not going to say no two relationships are the same, because that would be foolish, but relationships are different from one another.
Take Rule #1 for example. It gets violated all the time. There are tons and tons of stories of couples breaking up, but for some reason or another neither of them really felt it was time to move on and they ended up getting back together and living happily (whether permanently or not). For every time that article (I'd call it an article) says "This is never true" or "Don't tell yourself this, it's always a lie" or "Don't delude yourself into thinking this" there are hundreds of people who can honestly say "Actually, that happened to me." People break up for any myriad of reasons, some of them leave more than a little room for reconciliation. Believing that a relationship isn't truly over just because someone says it is may usually prove wrong, but there are more than enough exceptions that someone might be justified in thinking otherwise. And even in those situations where it turns out the relationship is really over, who's to say they couldn't have rekindled it if they'd acted differently? Even if most of the things they said in that post were usually true, that doesn't mean they're always true and it definitely doesn't mean that someone should think it's automatically true just because that's the way things usually go. It has nothing at all to do with thinking yourself a unique snowflake and everything to do with being aware of the almost immeasurable complexity of the human condition.
If this is true of the vast majority of people out there, we are a world of people in desperate need of therapy because this is a really fucked up outlook on life that requires validation from every ex you have to let you know that you're worth loving.
I never said it had anything to do with requiring validation from every ex. Personally, at the end of every serious relationship I've ever been in, I take stock in exactly what went wrong and how I could've stopped myself from getting hurt. By the time the next relationship comes along, I've got a plan. This time I'm going to be more vigilant for the warning signs, I'm not going to let myself fall in love until I'm absolutely sure it's not going to happen again. Okay, I've been vigilant enough, I've kept myself guarded properly, I'm finally going to let my feelings out and completely fall for this woman, and
son of a bitch, it happened again!
Realizing that someone is completely over you means realizing that you actually have no idea what the hell you're doing. No matter how sure you were that they loved you enough that they'd never hurt you the way they did, you were wrong. And you may never be right. And for the reasons I've outlined above, the moment of realizing someone's done with you doesn't always come with when they said they were done with you.
Going to stop you there and say that it has nothing to do with "not getting deeply involved", but failing to get over past relationships reveals some severe codependency issues and you have to admit that is a huge red flag for a need to seek therapy. It is a pretty well established point in psychiatric circles that codependency is a huge deal and not normal or healthy, are you and others on here disputing this?
First of all this argument is obviously going to be a contentious one because there is no DSM criteria for codependency. Codependency is defined as excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner, and I think anyone who's ever been in an argument with anyone ever can tell what the key word there is. In fact, the very fact that the word "excessive" is there means that there is such a thing as non-excessive reliance. If you love someone, it would logically follow that you would be sad if they were gone. That's what love is. Love is wanting to be close to someone, and it therefore follows that if you do love someone, you should be sad to see them walk out of your life. The more you love someone, the more sad you should be. It doesn't classify as codependence if your reaction is proportionally appropriate to the situation. Codependence only applies if you get too close too fast, or if you take a lot longer than you should to get over it. If you get over a relationship as soon as it's over, that's fine, but it also means you didn't love the person (which does happen in a lot of relationships). Maybe from there you can argue that love only holds us back, but that's a whole separate argument.
Poll
Author
Topic: WCDT 14 Mar-18 Mar 2011 (1881-1885) (Read 109369 times)