The Big Bumper Entry of Mr Nearly
22.04.09 - 12:09 a.m.
Note: In this entry, I shall refer to two distinct entities - true Love, which is a choice, and "feelings of love", which for simplicity's sake I shall sometimes refer to as 'love', in inverted commas.
After reading the previous entry, someone asked me why I still seem to have so much bitterness toward Mr Nearly, and how I should "learn to forgive him", which ended up making me really, REALLY, REALLY upset.
Before I go on, I would like to say that this is the last entry in which I shall ever mention Mr Nearly again. I am sick to death of all the thoughts and emotions which I have felt over the years with regards to this subject. After this entry, I will never mention him again or refer to our relationship as long as I live. I promise. (At least, I promise to try my best never to speak of him again, so please help me by refraining from speaking of him to me also.) I cannot cope with the memory of it being in easy access - I must push it to the back of my mind, in cold storage, with all the other painful memories in my life, until hopefully the photographic film decays beyond repair.
* * *
Firstly, I am not bitter towards Mr Nearly. After a lot of slogging away at the task of forgiving over the years, I am on civil terms with him. We say "Hi" to each other. If we ever had to work together I think I could stand not batting an eyelid, as long as the past was never, ever mentioned. We never speak of the past anymore. My nightmares about him have stopped. I am able to numb myself towards him as he exists as a living, growing person. I wish him nothing but the best for his future happiness. It is only the static memories from the past which continue to hurt me, and I am working on that and have already made a lot of progress.
* * *
"The person that you love the most is the one that you don't end up with" - My two cents' worth.
Mr Nearly was someone for whom I had very, very strong feelings, the ULTIMATE in my life. I do not think I could have kept up those strong feelings if we had continued to be together. We were not suited for each other at all, and had the relationship lasted any longer than it did, it would have degenerated into (even more) squalor and despair and inane soul-draining arguments. But for a brief while, I was head over heels. It was irrational, but feelings are always irrational.
There's a saying that "the person that you love the most is the one that you don't end up with", and I feel that there is truth in it. The usage of the word "love" in this sentence refers to "feelings of love", not real Love itself. In other words, it's saying that the person that you feel the strongest feelings for is the one you don't marry. And, if you think about it, it makes sense. In a relationship based on rational decisions, there is a natural limit to the intensity of the feelings that one can feel for the beloved, for the simple reason that no human being is worth so much. No human being can ever keep one absolutely safe, no human being can offer one more than limited understanding, we will never be in perfect accord with anyone else in this life. Everyone has their own irritating habits, their inborn set of flaws and ugliness. The reality of human imperfection limits the amount that one can allow oneself to feel for anyone else.
But in some relationships, even though one can see the other person's flaws, the "common sense" function fails to work, and the feelings are so strong they overwhelm the natural limitations of reality. That's where all the business of not able to eat, not able to sleep, always worrying about the other person's safety every minute of the day, not being able to say goodbye without feeling like the world is ending, etc etc, comes from. I believe this is a distinct entity from "infatuation", which is a natural stage of every relationship and occurs every time people are attracted to each other (it's often quoted in books as lasting 1-2 years, which is why usually long-term incompatibility makes itself felt after 2 years in any romantic relationship). This phenomenon of "irrational feelings" - STRONG STRONG "feelings of love" - characterises only some relationships, not all of them actual loving ones. It is the kind of 'love' that Yeats had for Maud Gonne, and presumably the kind of 'love' that produced many of the love poems by the Romantics (I'm not talking about Dante's stilnovist love, which is a very different thing - a Love as cool-headed as this 'love' is hot!)
In relationships where the "common sense" restraining function has been suspended, and there are such irrationally strong feelings, it is statistically improbable that both parties are actually good for each other, because very often, if both were able to relate as equals in most areas of life, and if their intellectual processes matched both in level and in method, the nature of their relationship would have fallen quite naturally into a 'sensible' groove from the beginning, and they would relate with "heart and mind and their entire being", to borrow a quote well known to Rogue Squadron fans. The 'mind' component provides the common sense and the ability to restrain the heart from feeling 'love' too fast and too strong to match the pace of the relationship.
I don't doubt it is possible that irrationally strong feelings can also exist when a couple is rationally compatible, but I don't think it happens very often. Those are the fortunate ones who get to "end up with the person they love the most". If you follow the train of thought above, it stands to reason that most instances of irrationally strong feelings are the result of relationships that are mismatched in other areas. Sooner or later the mismatch becomes unbearable, and couples split up, the best thing for them. In other instances, the couple ignores their fundamental incompatibility because 'if we love each other so much, we must be doing the right thing to stay together', and tragedies result - marriage, children who see their parents fighting all the time, divorce. That is the worst case scenario.
For me, then, Mr Nearly was "the person whom you love the most but you don't end up with". And thank God that we both escaped what would otherwise have made our lives hell.
So when I say Mr Nearly was the person for whom I had the ULTIMATE strongest feelings, I do not mean that I can never love anyone else again. In fact, I don't think there was much love in our relationship - on hindsight, we were incapable of understanding each other's thought processes and when you can't really understand someone or know them, how can you love them? I have learnt by now, and I have said this many times, that love is not based on feelings, but it is a choice. And I believe I can't say "I love you" with integrity at the beginning of any relationship nor even after marriage, as a fact. I can say it only as a promise to do my best to show loving behaviour towards someone else. I feel that love is something that can only be proved after a marriage of many years' standing. It is only after one has promised to be faithful to someone for life, and stuck to that for many years, that one can be worthy of claiming to be able to love someone.
* * *
"Move on!"
I have gone to great lengths to explain all this, so that I may a) endeavour to give an inkling of how much I felt towards Mr Nearly and b) explain why I do not see it as abnormal that I felt and feel such feelings of hurt when it ended, because of the way it ended.
What caused me a great deal of frustration in the 3 years that followed was that everyone whom I met thought it very unnatural for me to have been so badly hurt by this relationship. Most people said, "Get over it. It's time to move on," and various other unhelpful things. Mr Nearly himself said, "Move on!" and led by example, with an impressive demonstration of just how fast it was possible to move on.
My statement is: If you 'love' someone, will you really move on so quickly?
I have said that I do not think it possible to say with certainty that I really Loved Mr Nearly, as love is something seen in hindsight, and in this case the relationship did not last long enough to demonstrate it. However, I really had meant "I love you" as a promise which I considered to have been a true promise even when the relationship ended. It was not just a description of my emotional state. It had been a promise.
When I say 'I love you' to someone, it does not mean 'If the relationship were to end now, I will quickly move on to someone else'.
If one really loved or 'loved' someone and the relationship ended with the other party cutting one out of his/her life, would you expect one to be fully functional so soon? In one year? In two years? Would you expect someone to be able to cease to be hurt by it? Would you expect someone to stop thinking about it? To stop feeling heart pain with every heartbeat? To stop dreaming about it? Would you expect someone to be able to get together with someone else as if one had never said 'I love you' to Mr Nearly and MEANT IT?
And because I was still trying to love him as best as I could even when I was crippled emotionally and in my studies by his absence, I tried very hard, I tried my very best, to go on demonstrating loving behaviour towards him. I knew what he wanted was for me to leave him alone, so I tried my best to do that although I missed him terribly for the first year and more, so badly that I used to dream about him every night. On the rare occasions that we met, I succeeded in being nice and civil to the girl he replaced me with (and most other times I avoided her). I gave up trying to explain to him that it hurt me when he brought her to our class play. Why should he try to accomodate me anymore, right? And I refrained from writing about my pain. Hitherto words had been the only means I knew of releasing pain and frustration, but for his sake I turned to other means which would allow me to keep my mouth shut. I picked up long-distance running. I ran 5 km, then 10 km. Then my first half-marathon. Then another half-marathon. Then a full marathon, and a half-marathon, and another full marathon. Running became the way I dealt with my grief and my anger, and it still is whenever I feel upset about anything.
My friends said:
"If it had not been him, it would have been someone else."
This is true. The magnitude of my reaction to Mr Nearly is of course to do with my own emotions, my own stage of development as a person, my own beliefs about love, my own history of Romanticism, my own expectations of other people - which are substantially lower by now. My devastation was not proportional in any way to how big a jerk Mr Nearly was, he was just being a normal 20-year-old guy who had not read or thought very much in life, and no one could blame him for failing to be something that he was not. In other words, there is nothing very much out of the ordinary with the way Mr Nearly behaved. Most other guys would have behaved exactly the same way. In retrospect, no 20-year-old guy on earth could have met my needs in a relationship. (At the moment, at the age of 24, I am not very sure that any 24-year old can, either. In fact, I am not very sure if ANY guy can, and am prepared to stay unmarried for the rest of my life).
My friends said:
"He's not worth being so upset about!" / "He's so weird!"
This is something I have issue with. As I have said, I loved (or 'loved') Mr Nearly with a genuine promise, and no matter what or who a person is, shouldn't they be worth keeping a promise? One of the reasons, I always feel, that I felt so strongly towards Mr Nearly was that I sensed he had had a lot of trouble fitting in with other people in his life and had in his time gone through his fair share of being unpopular and considered 'weird', which resonated with me as so had I. I don't like people to tell me that Mr Nearly was 'weird', because in my vocabulary 'weird' is a bad word, having had it thrown at me for almost the whole of my life, simply because I read deeply and thought deeply and associated with people who did.
I wish the whole world loved 'weird' people. They need your love.
Of course, in one's early twenties, one comes to realise that most people are weird in some way or another, so being 'weird' is normal and it's valid to call someone weird because EVERYBODY is weird. But I don't think the word should actually be used to brand people with.
Mr Nearly himself used to try to make me stop being sad and mad by telling me himself "I'm [i.e. Mr Nearly] not worth it!", which only made me even more upset, since he had got over me in record time, and the unspoken meaning is that he thought that I [me] wasn't worth it because he would only have not gotten over me if he had thought I had been worth it.
Do you see what I mean?
Everyone is "worth it", intrinsically, just by existing. Everyone is worth respect and love. I thought Mr Nearly was worth it, which is why I had 'loved' him in the first place. However, although while he was interested in me he was falling over himself to declare his love, once he realised he didn't love me he was falling over himself to put as much distance between us as possible. He had never thought I was worth it. It took me years to realise that actually, whether or not he thought I was worthy of respect or love, I was actually "worth it" because my worth did not rise and fall depending on whether he thought I was. I am "worth it" because God loves me, not because Mr Nearly 'loves'/does not 'love' me. And Mr Nearly is "worth it" - worth my respect and love - because God loves him, not because I 'love' him.
My friends said:
"You have to forgive him".
With God's help, I believe that I largely have forgiven Mr Nearly by now (see my entries 'The Spotless Mind' (Oct 2008) and 'Forgiveness' (Nov 2008) for a glimpse into my struggle to forgive).
However, from time to time, I felt a need to talk about feelings of pain and frustration, which still came back from time to time, usually in the context of my grades. For after one has learnt to deal with the emotions and wrestle them into submission, the practical consequences remain - in this case, bad grades. Hence, in my last entry, I wrote that passing my exams and exiting university finally renders me "free" of being constantly reminded of Mr Nearly in the form of bad grades - because from now on there will be nothing which holds me back so much from moving on as those grades were.
Having to talk about my sadness and frustration at my grades did not mean that I was not forgiving Mr Nearly. It simply meant that I was sad and frustrated at the fact that my involvement with Mr Nearly and the tornado of emotions that followed (MY FAULT, MY REACTION, yes, not Mr Nearly's fault) had wreaked such havoc on my life as a student and prevented me from maximising my academic potential at university. Sometimes I am still sad about it, but when I talk about it it doesn't mean that I'm still filled with bitterness and unforgiveness. At least I don't think so.
I admit that my frustration with grades has in recent years superceded a lot of the other frustration at Mr Nearly as a trigger for thinking negative and brooding thoughts and remembering WHAT caused my weak foundation. That was why I was so glad to be finally free of exams - because for the last few years they have been the most constant reminder of Mr Nearly in my life. I do not like to think of Mr Nearly in a negative way. But sometimes I can't help it. That is precisely why I am looking forward to life after exams - because the triggers for being reminded of Mr Nearly's effect on my grades will be gone.
* * *
Mr Nearly's legacy
The practical impact that the whole Mr Nearly incident had on my life was very simply that my grades dropped. I must qualify this by saying that it was not Mr Nearly who turned me from a straight-A student into a C student. He merely turned me from a B student into a C student - the fall from As dates back to junior college, pre-Mr Nearly, and is multifactorial.
This brings us to a whole can of worms, thoughts and emotions about which I would not like to elaborate too much, about my 'fall' from a straight-A student to a below-average student over the past 7 years, until now, when I feel I am finally on track to climbing up again back to someone who is confident in my abilities. The nadir was my third year of university; and I have been using the last 2 years of my life to go back to old habits of diligence and get back on track. By the mercy of God, with the invaluable help of friends, and through plain old hard work, I felt that I had finally made up for that year of emotional and mental prostration by the time I took my final exams, and I feel that although the fact that I passed is something to really thank God for, I do not feel as if I did not earn it or had passed on false pretences. The fact is I have been working hard to make up for the time lost in grieving for Mr Nearly.
I also put 'fall' in inverted commas as I feel there was a lot I gained during this period, and it was not a loss at all. I learnt many skills, I learnt a whole lot about myself, and I also had many opportunities to do many things and make many friends I might not have had if I was still a slave to getting good grades. I got close to God, I learnt to swallow my pride. And now I'm actually quite happy no longer to be known by people by the rather insipid phrase "she's very smart", but for many other things and for who I really am. In losing good grades, I gained a lot of other things, which will stand me in good stead to be a more complete and definitely a more mature person, as I rebuild my database of skills and knowledge.
* * *
In summary.
I feel that there is a lot I gained which more than compensated for what I lost.
I have largely forgiven Mr Nearly. Forgiveness is a process, of course, and I must go on forgiving for the rest of my life, but I no longer feel strong unpleasant feelings towards him - occasional flashes of grief and rage can still be triggered, by news reports and the like, but they are few and far between and do not last long.
Sometimes I still feel upset, and when this happens I want to write about it - about what I lost, but it does not mean I have forgotten what I gained. Often I refrain from writing because I still try to demonstrate loving behaviour towards Mr Nearly, which often means that I DO NOT write what I want to write because it would not be good for him. Maybe one day soon I will be convinced that this entry, too, should not be put online, and I will take it down. Maybe one day I will feel that the most loving thing to do is for everything I have ever written about him to be taken down (which essentially means removing this entire diary from the Web).
What I have already promised is that this will be the very last time I write about Mr Nearly. From now, no more. As I said, I will try not to refer to this even in talking any more. Please don't bring it up so that it will not come to mind more than I can help.
Grief is a process. Mr Nearly is already nearly out of my system. I have moved on a great deal already. Please stop trying to accelerate what I have already been doing my best to do. As I said: When you love someone, is it not natural to grieve when you lose them, even for long periods of time? Who are you to say how long is 'too long'? If you know me well, you know how I have always been doing my best not to indulge in self-pity and not to entertain sad memories. I have a history of dealing with negative emotions and I am quite good at it by now and at maintaining a positive outlook. I am not hanging on to bitter or angry feelings more than I can help. I am tired of explaining to people why it has taken me so long, but I am doing my best.
