Imagine you meet someone when you’re in high school and you fall in love. Your relationship is innocent, fun and revolves around what you do on the weekends or after school hours. There probably isn’t much responsibility in the relationship, and you continue to date going on dinner dates and movies whenever you can get enough money from your parents or from a part-time job. You two become best friends, spending every spare moment together. This goes until college comes around, and one of you moves to study away. Or maybe neither of you move away, and you continue to date while you go to a local college and save up to move into your own place.
It doesn’t happen overnight, or even in the light of a possible new lover. In fact, most couples don’t know how it happens, but eventually, one of you falls out of love. This isn’t the type of love that ends because of cheating or lying, but rather the love that just dies. Like a candle who’s wick and burned all the way down, and then flickers to dark. Eventually, you realize your significant other does not have the same real life values and responsibilities you have, and maybe you both have grown into two adults who are no longer compatible. What happens then? One of you becomes the heartbreaker. The person who is depicted as evil and heartless, the person who tells the other they no longer want to be together, crushing their life into a billion pieces.
Most friends and family are concerned with helping the heartbroken person feel better, and consoling them to the point they may even stain the heartbreakers name with hurtful words and revengeful actions. But most people do not stop to ask what the heartbreaker is feeling. Why did they do it? What pushed them to the point of no longer being comfortable with their best friend? The pain a heartbreaker can feel is usually overlooked and pushed aside; because they hurt someone else they are a monster. But the distraught they are feeling is real, and it goes deep. The way I see it, the heartbreaker was simply brave enough to realize that they are living one life, and they should do what they need to in order to be happy, and most importantly to never settle. It is never an easy thing to do, to hurt another person. The action itself can cause one feeling of guilt and pain. But is it fair for that person to stay in unhappiness and pain in order for the other to experience feelings of love and happiness?
It is so important to view a situation that maybe your friend, family member, or even you are in and realize there are two types of pain. One that is caused by heartbreak and by usually another person inflicting it on you. Then, there is the pain that comes indirectly, when your heart is no longer in it and you don’t know why. This pain has two divisions, the one that you experience every day you stay with that person and hold yourself back, and the one you experience when you leave that person, and feel guilty and relieved at the same time. It is never ok to blame any one person for the turmoil a relationship can end, but instead, you have to view it as a whole with multiple parts. Unless the one person deliberately acted in an unfaithful way or out of hate, it might not be their fault they are leaving. It might just be life. And just because life happens, doesn’t mean it’s anyone’s fault. The sun rises every day and no one takes responsibility for that. Do not take responsibility or force responsibility on someone else for something that just happens. These things are not meant to cause pain forever, but to cause growth instead. Love yourself first and you will make it out alive.
