Always A Fighter

A sad fact of life: It is easier to leave your current partner and find someone else who will give you what you want rather than staying when things have gotten difficult to try to make things work and reach a compromise.

In my earlier relationships, I have always been responsible for leaving. Why will I put up with endless fighting when I can just find someone else who won't fight with me? I justified leaving each relationship I had by rationalizing that I can just find one whose interests and principles match mine and who will be easier to get along with than my current partner. I highly value myself and I should fight for my ideals and what I want, even if it means having to leave another person for it. I was not afraid of being alone.

If we were to base our relationship pattern with how we were as babies -as suggested by most psychology and self-help books- then it can also be concluded that I had been a "leaver" since birth. I came into this world a week earlier than expected. I had left my mother's womb before I was completely "baked". Interpreted, it can be both positive -meaning I am more prone to be early for appointments. Or negative -meaning I am also most likely to leave a relationship too soon, probably before it is given a chance to hurt me.

But lately, I have tried to unhinge from my usual pattern of leaving. In my last two relationships, whenever I felt the urge to up and leave, I either control it and try to give another chance to my partner or when I've already expressed my need to be free, I listen and easily accept when they try to reason with me to stay.

In short, I had become a fighter not for my own cause but for the other person -fighting to keep them in my life, fighting to love them still despite any shortcomings they may have had.

But now that I am opening myself to lessons as part of my goal to a happier me, I am trying to strike the right balance between loving myself and being fair to the next person I will enter a relationship with. This means I won't just fight for anyone if they are not worth it simply to deviate from my old pattern (because the old pattern did not work).Being raised by parents who never wanted to meddle when I try to ask them to beat up past bullies at school, I know that waiting for someone to fight for you makes you weak. Fight for yourself because you are worth it.

Yes, I am back. And this time the fighting is for myself.

On choosing love

Love is a choice, and it has always been that way for me in the past. I think choosing to love is a natural course to follow for girls, especially since it is not us but usually the men who do the picking for us, and we just choose to say yes or reject a love that comes our way.

I can love at will, and I can stop at will, too. I know it sounds mechanical and not at all romantic, but I have lived the first quarter of my life alone and independently before finally caving in and saying yes to a very devoted boy who adored me and loved me with the strongest of passions when I was 24. He was the most sincere, earnest and loving man I’ve ever met that I just can’t refuse him when he asked me to be his girl.

Looking back at all my relationships after him, I have observed that my pattern for loving someone has always been going along with whoever chooses me and humouring his attention/love for me by trying to reciprocate it with as much attention/love as I can. The few times that I had been the one in charge of choosing my partner, I had immediately ended it due to lack of patience in waiting for him to reciprocate my love, or ended it because it never really felt right for me to steal someone else’s love, and I felt the urge to “return” him to his proper owner.

I have always been confident that I can “love” again.

Sometimes, though, I am afraid that I’m not doing it right. “Have I ever really fallen in love?” I ask myself numerous times. I know that one of the most apparent signs of falling in love is holding on and fighting to keep the person you love. However, I found that in my first few relationships, it has always been me who initiates ending the relationship. Sadly, by the time that I have figured out that I was not being the ideal mate by always letting someone go, ironically, it suddenly seemed that my partners are always letting me go.

Now, at a stage in my life where I can choose to love someone else again, I’d like to temporarily release hold on my share of happiness, as I found that it chips away my dignity. As Glory Szabo says, happiness is not a race with other people. I am stronger than my happiness.