The Hardest Part About Getting Over A Relationship You Were Never In

If you never dated, getting over them should be easy right?

If you never had a label then it was never actually real and if it wasn’t real it shouldn’t hurt right?

If you never slept with them you shouldn’t be so emotionally connected right?

Wrong.
Anyone who tells you, your feelings and the pain that weighs heavy isn’t justified doesn’t know relationships today or love at all.

They think you’re choosing the wrong person but you’re not.

If love was actually a choice we’d all fall for the right people who give us what we deserve and we’d all be happy choosing love. But love chooses us and you can either fight that denying how you feel about individuals or let it take you however way it wants to. Driving you both crazy and somehow keeping you sane all at the same time.

Almost-relationships aren’t just defined by someone not feeling the same way but rather someone not being able to be what you need physically or emotionally.

Every time you hook up and you’re lying there next to them, you wish you could just stay there in that moment where they seem to care. But they come up with every reason this can’t be a thing. And you take what you get from them realizing it may not be what you need but they are someone you so desperately want any standard you might have with other people doesn’t apply to them.

There are rules we follow when it comes to dating, then there are certain people we break them for us. Certain people, we’ve implemented rules because of. Certain people who have us wrapped around their finger. They come so close, to being what we need but in our hearts we know it’s never going to happen. Sometimes it takes your heart a little longer to catch up with your head.

Maybe it’s a relationship that’s just emotional.

Emotional relationships are the toughest ones to get over because you can’t identify that clearly if this person is leading you on. We all know having sex with someone consistently and not committing is wrong. We all can point at that and say that’s fucked up they keep doing that. And we hate ourselves that we keep allowing it.

But with emotional relationships and those grey lines are even more confusing because there is nothing to point at when someone keeps erasing and redrawing what type of game this is you’re even playing.

Because here is someone who makes up every part of a relationship you would want. They provide emotional support when you need it, they talk to you every day, they make you laugh harder than anyone, they breakthrough your walls and you truly get to know who they are, what they stand for and next thing you know you’ve fallen for this person only nothing physical has even happened. And neither of you have had the conversation of is this going anywhere? Because for some reason or another you each know it won’t but that doesn’t change how one person feels. It’s just this really deep emotional connection that is impossible to hide.

Social media just helps to be a pawn in this game. When you have an emotional relationship with someone, it’s not generic snaps, they send things to only you, it’s not like they like everything you post, they are selective with it, there’s that feeling when they looked at your story first and you each are watching each other’s every move wondering what the next one will be.

Emotionally leading someone on and falling for them because they did that doesn’t make you seem crazy.

We are a generation of people playing this game of emotional or physical attachment but fearing commitment and running the other way when someone comes on too strong. We claim we want love but we’ve lost sight of what it actually means.

So instead, we grow emotionally attached to people and have to put on a poker face when they hurt us or pull away or just drop off the face of the earth. They can and they do. And they don’t owe you an explanation because you aren’t actually dating.

We shouldn’t call them almost relationships because this has turned into what normal dating actually is.

Then we wonder why we are so paranoid and don’t trust people. We don’t trust people because they teach us that we can’t trust ourselves with the things we feel. Because everything we’ve felt in the past led us to dead ends.

We’ve replaced caring with pretending we don’t.

We’ve replaced love with fear.

We replaced starting relationships with who can be the first to end it.

And we’ve replaced allowing yourself to get over someone and heal with finding someone new at the swipe of your finger.

This has become dating today.

When you have a lot of relationships that just linger and fade out there is no real ending.

When you date someone there is a clear start and end point.

When you have a physical or emotional almost relationship with someone, you don’t get closure. All you get is someone walking away with everything you felt not being able to have reciprocated it.

And every time you see each other again, those feelings don’t just go away they resurface and you think maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe someone changed. But you just run in these circles that exhaust you but you can’t stop it either.

They don’t like us enough to commit but they don’t want to let go of us either. So we stay in this limbo.

The hardest part about healing the relationships we weren’t even in is, we have to do it quietly and alone because we feel like complete fools for falling so hard, knowing we shouldn’t have in the first place.

Most almost relationships just fizzle out taking with them as they leave, the best parts of us and everything we were willing to do for someone who couldn’t do the same. And we are left not sure where to go from there or what we can even offer someone new.

We move on yearning what never was but loving them like all of it was so real. Because it was real to us.

But what you come to learn in time is you meet someone new and even though it doesn’t feel like you have it in you to give 110%, they don’t ask that of you. The right person who comes into your life after these hard relationships that weren’t actual ones teaches you, all you ever had to do was give 50% and they’ll take care of the rest.