Seeing My Situationship as a Mirror Rescued Me from Hypocrisy
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. People are mirrors and when you are in a romantic relationship or situationship, you will see some things about yourself that you would never see in a friendship or family relationship.
I met someone late 2016 and instinctively knew that it wasn’t going to go anywhere. If I know your past and I know you’ve done nothing to investigate why your past was the way it was, you will be doomed to repeat it. I wanted no part of the collateral damage.
But in getting to know her, I started to believe that the risk of collateral damage was low. “She’s too giving and sensitive,” I thought.
She really was those things but people are complex. Give them a new context and you will see a new person.
I told her that I liked her and she gushed that she felt the same. I felt like we were mirrors of one another.
But a week and a half later she was ignoring me and talking to someone else and by the end of the week, she invited the new person to my house without my knowledge and when they left I didn’t hear from her for two weeks.
It was two weeks because I decided to message her. For all I know if I messaged her a year later, she would’ve never said a word in a year.
She said she needed an escape. “An escape from what?” I asked. She spoke about work, health and home stress. But that made no sense. Why would this other person be an escape? That’s what I should’ve asked.
The thing about me and this girl is that we really are mirrors but aside from the flippant and fun similarities, we mirrored the aspect of ourselves that kept us down the most.
For me, I believed the lies in my head. If it sounded good and it gave me what I wanted, I’d fall for it. It was embarrassing as someone who considered himself a skeptic. I walked away from religion. I didn’t like comforting lies, but perhaps that was my shadow.
Once I started to hate on those who lived comforting lies and never examined the things they believed in, I couldn’t see how I was guilty of the very thing I was condemning. Which of course made me stay in hopeless situations for far too long.
