It's like this - I've been obsessed with girls, plenty. There's seldom been a stage in my life where I've not been permanently thinking about someone. I've obsessed over them, fretted over them, penned horrible poems about them. Done all the lame things people who are infatuated with (the idea of) someone do. Stalked them relentlessly on Facebook. Poured over every SMS, searching for hidden meanings. Analyzed, overanalyzed, everything they say. But that's not love, is it? No, love is reciprocal. You can't really say you're in love if the person is unaware of your affections, or (is it?) worse, is aware of them, but doesn't feel the same way.
Around the end of last year I went through the last of these infatuations, and swore thereafter I was done. Unrequited love, obsessive, fawning love, putting someone on a pedestal and building up every insignificant thing they do into this perfect construct, this avatar of your affection, I'm straight up calling bullshit on that. It's not healthy. It's not good. It's not cool. There is nothing admirable about the hopeless romantic - it's just sad and depressing.
What I'm pleased about is that I've been true to my word. There's been plenty of girls I've been interested in since then, and the ones that it seemed worth it (there's a long list of criteria - maybe I still overthink things?) to go for, I have, and while the results have been mixed, they've been results. And when it ended, for whatever reason, I moved the fuck on, got on with my life, more often than not with them and I still friends, which is great. It's healthy. It's part of growing up. Being stuck in that self-destructive cycle of "Oh my god if only she knew how perfect we would be together" is a terrifying downward spiral into self-esteem genocide. Even just typing that above made me cringe, because I've been there. Was there often.
So this year has been good. There's been no unrequited love (not from my side, but I have now been on the opposite side of the fence and while it's not much better being the object of said affection, at least it was a change of scenery) but there's been plenty of good fun.
But I still haven't been in love. I haven't shared something special with someone - there's been a handful of girls who I could see that happening with, but it never progressed to that stage. And that's a good thing. It's a natural pruning of compatibility as you learn more about people and find out just how fucking crazy they are (most are very, very crazy). Building someone up into this ideal, putting them on a pedestal and venerating their every move, their every Facebook post, every utterance is personally disastrous and enormously, emotionally unhealthy.
I'm glad that's in the past. It has been a long and hard lesson to learn.
So no, I haven't been in love. Not really. Not by my definition of the thing. And I'm okay with that. The same someone who sparked this line of questioning sent me this, and it made everything seem okay:
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