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On heartbreak

May 19, 2019

It’s tempting to look for someone who loves you more than you love them. This is a mistake.

The imbalance of power means these relationships are doomed. If you do stay together, that’s only because you lack the strength to move on (and you probably know it, which is depressing).

When you seek to find someone who loves you more than you love them, it’s because you’re not really comfortable with being vulnerable in a relationship.  

A strong relationship requires both parties to be vulnerable with the other. You have to give your heart to someone and trust that they won’t hurt you. You can’t do that if you’re trying to hold all the cards.

You might feel relieved that you’ll never have to worry about them wanting to leave you. But this isn’t fair, because then you end up wanting to break up with them.

Why is it inevitable that you’ll want to break up with them? One way the power imbalance manifests itself is that they’re always willing to put up with more crap than you are. So you treat them badly. You constantly get annoyed and lose your temper. You know it’s wrong, but you also don’t care enough to fix it… until you realize you can only fix it by breaking up with them.

You might think you’ve saved yourself from ever facing the pain of rejection. But you’ve just transferred your pain to another person—which makes you a bad person.

(Still, you shouldn’t blame yourself too much if this is the first you’re realizing it, because you probably couldn’t have known what you were doing in advance.)

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