You know that boy? The one you want so badly to just hate. You want to despise him, you’re not even asking so much as to be indifferent. You just want those positive feelings, the ones that make you want him, to go away. You don’t care what they turn into. You don’t care what your relationship looks like with him in the future. He deserves your distaste and you want to give it to him. But you can’t. For some reason you just can’t bring yourself to hate him. You can’t even bring yourself to stop wanting him.
Maybe he led you on for months, maybe he had a girlfriend back home that he hid from you, he cheated, or maybe he made you fall for him and then he left. No matter what he did, you know you should hate him. You want to hate him. And maybe you do hate him, for all of 10 seconds. But then it’s over and the pain is flushed by that hope. The hope that feels warm inside of your stomach and shoves your pain down deep into your gut where you can’t feel it. You can’t feel it so you forget that it’s there. And you only hate him for those few seconds that your optimism fades.
You list off all of the excuses that you’ve come up with for him. “He has trust issues”, “His last relationship ended poorly, he’s just scared”, “commitment issues, he just needs to know that I’m in this”, “I wasn’t up front enough with him”, “I should have told him how I felt”, “He’s a boy! He just wants to fool around for a little while and then he’ll come back!” They’re all just lies that we tell ourselves. Lies that we make up in order to enable our misplaced optimism. Maybe they’re lies that he told you. Either way, they aren’t true.
Here’s the truth. In this moment he thinks that you aren’t enough for him. And in this moment, he is wrong. In this moment, HE is not enough for YOU. If he’ll hurt you now, he will hurt you again. If he left you now, who’s to say that he won’t do it again? In those 10 seconds that you hated him, what you felt was raw. In those 10 seconds you allowed yourself to feel everything that he’s done to you. You allowed the pain in, the pain that he caused. You felt your raw, unexcused, unfiltered pain. When you stop making excuses for him you can begin to move on.
Forgiving him by pushing down your pain is not what you need. You need to feel your pain, you need to allow your feelings to react appropriately to what he has done. And then when you hate him for all of 10 seconds, hold onto that. Feel it. That warm sensation in the pit of your stomach, it’s like a hot stone in your gut. Let your legs shake. Dig your nails into the palm of your hand. You’re angry. Be angry. Feel the sensation of your face turning red. Imagine yourself like a cartoon, steam coming out your ears. You’re pissed. He pissed you off. Be pissed. Think about what he did to hurt you. As those 10 seconds start to flee think about why you should hate him.
Stop thinking about the good things, all the things that he discredited when he broke your heart. The time he threw you over his shoulder to get you out of bed and dance with him, it doesn’t matter anymore. The time that he called you his girl in front of all this friends, he doesn’t feel like that anymore. The time he brought you out for pizza because you were having a rough day, don’t think about it. Because now you need to hate him. Loving him, wanting him, it isn’t what’s best for you.
So when you hate him for all of 10 seconds, close your eyes and hold onto that. Eventually, your hatred will turn to annoyance, and then disinterest. That’s when you’ll be happiest—when you just stop caring. But no one has ever gone from loving someone to just not caring. Let yourself move on. You hated him for those 10 seconds for a reason. Feel it.
