I’ve always been the ‘falling head-over-heels in a matter of minutes’ kind of girl. I’ve never been the one to shy away from relationships. I believe in love and the magic that follows and I believe that two people can be happy together, forever, even if their personalities are poles apart.
It’s the differences that keeps two people together. It’s these several trajectories that make a relationship work, it’s the clashing of ideas and egos. This very difference is the fundamental reason why two people click. This difference teaches us to see things through someone else’s viewpoint, see things with a newer, fresher perspective. Differences are necessary because they help our minds grow.
But he seemed to think otherwise. He seemed to think that to be happy, we needed more in common. There were days when we would agree on the same things, complete each other’s thoughts and sentences and we would be in sync. There were nights when he made me feel like – this is it – it doesn’t get better than this. He made me believe that we could work our way through everything, no matter how different we were, that little hurdles posed as differences wouldn’t and shouldn’t matter.
He told me that he loved me. He did everything that made me believe that he wanted me for the rest of his life. He took care of me, he was protective of me and with him I felt safe. He made sure I was comfortable and he made sure that I was always happy, and no matter what would go wrong, I would run to him because he was my happy place. Little did I know that although he loved the idea of us, he had wanted it to just stay an idea. I wish I had known earlier that he wasn’t looking for anything serious in the long run. If I had known this, maybe I wouldn’t have gone out there and put all of my heart on the table and fallen in love like I had never before.
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He believed in God and religion, and it wasn’t like I didn’t. I believe in a supernatural force that guides us – one that we like to call “God.” He would get pensive over things like this. While I used to think that it’s only natural for people to be born “gay” and they are just as human as straight people, he used to think that it was unnatural that a man would, for some reason, develop sexual and intimate feelings for another man. We used to quarrel for hours about this.
He used to tell me our families would never be open to us getting married, and by this he meant that he would never allow someone like me to be part of his family. No matter how well-behaved he was, it didn’t matter that we were born in the same year. His mind didn’t want to accept changes like mine did. At the risk of sounding too stereotypical, his thoughts and ideologies were quite conservative. On the other hand, I wanted change, I was looking for change.
No matter how different we were and how difficult it got, I knew that I had to compromise. As the differences that were brewing between us grew, I realized that this wasn’t going anywhere. We had fallen in love but the differences that I thought would glue us together were slowly turning into our kryptonite. One day, he just told me that he’s leaving, that he didn’t want to commit to someone who was so different from him.
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I was furious, of course. Why did he start anything with me in the first place, just so he could leave? It wasn’t fair… but then, life is never fair. All I ever asked from him was to not leave me. I realize it was just a wishful thinking because he did leave.
With time I moved on, but I learnt a few things from him. He taught me that differences might bring two people closer but some things just don’t work, no matter how hard you try. He also taught me that just because two people are like each other, it doesn’t mean that they will be the happiest. For anything to work, there has to be a balance, and much before you find the balance, you have to make sure that it is what you want. He also taught me that it’s okay to expect things, to expect someone to commit to you. But most importantly, he taught me that no matter what you do, you can’t force someone to stay.
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