Read This When You Feel Like Your Love Life Is Out Of Your Control

Sometimes you have to realize that some things are forces in which you just cannot reckon with.

In life and in love, we find many similarities. We’re happy and we’re sad. We’re comfortable and we’re anxious. When our worlds involve other human beings, our emotions tend to be controlled by those individuals whether we like it or not.

Go a day without talking to your favorite person and you’ll feel the wrath of loneliness. Spend a day in the office with your most despicable coworker and you’ll be in a world of exhaustion and annoyance. Likewise, there’s a reason why holidays are such a big thing— everyone gets the chance to be surrounded by those loved ones they know best. People are mood changers — that’s a certain hypothesis.

When we speak in terms of love, those involved have a heavier influence on our moods and emotions than anyone else in the world. There is no one we enjoy our time with more, and there is no one we fight harder with, than our romantic partners — and there’s a reason for this. It’s because we care most about them. We get angrier with them because we have placed them on a pedestal that sits far higher than anyone else in our lives. When they make us happy, we’re happier than we could ever imagine. When they upset us, we feel a betrayal sharper than 100 knives. We all form high opinions of our lovers, opinions that pressure them to be something that they’re not: perfect.

We forget that, in love, we are involving other human beings. We’ve learned through experience that humans are far from perfect entities. We make mistakes, we say the wrong things, we make questionable decisions — it’s what we do. Each and every one of us is still growing; we’re still learning. The only way to truly learn anything in this life is through trial and error. Life is one giant learning process where we don’t always give curves. Every single one of us tend to forget this in romantic relationships. In our eyes, these are our people, specifically hand-picked for us. How dare they forget your birthday or never apologize for that snide remark?

Most importantly, in love, we forget that our better halves have minds of their own. We forget that what we want does not always align with what our partners want. We get offended when our partners speak of getting jobs far away or when they decide to spend Christmas with their families instead of ours. We forget that they are humans and that humans will always act out of self-interest because, philosophically speaking, ALL HUMANS ARE RATIONALISTS.

Breakups are the hardest shock into reality when it comes to realizing the humanity of your partner. When the people we love the most tell us they don’t love us anymore — or worse, they don’t want to see us anymore — it strikes a pain in our hearts similar to losing a loved one to death. Some may even argue that this pain is worse than death, as it indicates an active action of removing themselves from our lives.

Death is inevitable; breakups are sometimes not. We understand that this is an active decision being made on their part, and it is therefore more condemnable than the act of naturally leaving this world. In other words: breakups are far more personal than deaths. We all still dream that the people who have hurt us will change their minds and come running back to us. Through high emotions and pain, we fight with them. Fighting for and with someone only digs up pains from the past that had never bothered us until this point. This actually causes further stress and exhaustion on our mental and emotional cortices of our brains. We throw nasty words at them, we block their numbers and social media in an attempt to show them how much we really don’t care, when all the while it’s eating us from the inside and making us more miserable.

We go from being on top of the world, to being buried somewhere beneath the core. In this mess, we forget that our experiences are altered to us personally. We only see what we feel with no regards to the other person. We ultimately become hypocrites and tend to our feelings before anyone else’s.

But all the fighting back, all the advances in communication with the other person, it’s most likely not effective. There is a point when we must sit back and say, “This is something I cannot control. This is a force I cannot reckon with.” Because it’s true, free-will and humanity isn’t a force you should be reckoning with in the first place.

It’s a terrible thing in life, to love someone or something to such an extreme measure and not have that love reciprocated. It spins you into a dark vortex that makes you question your self-worth and who you are as a person. In all honesty, most breakups are more about the instigator than the instigated. And a lot of times, no one can really be at fault when we remember that humans were born with free will.

We do not own each other; likewise, we cannot control each other. This can be an aggravating concept to a species that is preoccupied with building and maintaining relationships. But as dogs understand what a growl means, we must understand what each other’s words and actions mean. Sometimes it’s hard to decipher the meaning of verbal and nonverbal messages from a sender — especially when the sender is “acting out of character” or makes an impulsive decision. A lot of times, these messages have no meaning at all. Everything depends on the sender and what the sender of those messages feels is necessary for his or her happiness.

Selfishness plays a huge role in relationships. We all want what we think is best for ourselves. We all choose the paths that make us the happiest, and not everybody’s path is like yours. When we acknowledge this, we must learn to accept this. Once accepted, a weight will be lifted from our shoulders and we will be able to sit back and enjoy the non-linear paths our lives take.

Not everything can be moved by us, not everything should be moved by us. But we can learn to sit back and watch them be moved in peace.