Here on Unfiltered Opinion, I’m not shy about dropping F-bombs or broadcasting my blunt assessments of news events and life. As such, it may seem that I have a harsh or unforgiving nature but I’m here today to make a somewhat contradictory confession to lead us into the topic that I want to discuss today. That admission is that I am a bit of a sappy romantic when it comes to love. I can’t get enough of things like chivalry, legends of heroic knights saving the day for their lady and all that crap. This has led me into trouble on several occasions because I have found myself hopelessly giddy for certain girls/women in the past and gone in WAY too deep with my heart while neglecting my mind and reason.
Before I go any further however, I feel that it’s important to point out that I do also believe that none of this should be applied to real world romance. Yes, there are exceptions amongst the fairer sex that will be receptive to some good old-fashioned chivalry but on the whole, the White Knight persona is bad news and should be discarded immediately if a man wishes to push a woman’s biological buttons and rev her up. I’m not saying that you should be an arsehole instead or that you shouldn’t hold doors open or buy a girl flowers but there’s a fine line between being a gentleman and just being a mug.
As I said, I have been down the path of getting too swept away by an initial attraction and this post is about coming out on the other side and being better off for some emotional suffering and hard but entirely necessary life lessons. As I also said, I still love all of that romantic shit but my head is screwed on tightly these days and I don’t intend to be so gung-ho about the flowery stuff going forward. This is me relating (loosely to smudge over any sensitive or personal information) my most recent folly and the important lessons that I learned.
This went on for about a year with me in full-on fool mode, telling myself that I had no chance but not believing the truth that I was attempting to convince myself of. I couldn’t get her out of my head and I got into quite a bad place where I ultimately ended up wishing I’d never met her or that she’d just leave me alone. It was a bit of a mini episode that I look back on now and feel embarassed about in all honesty. I obviously wasn’t in full command of my rationale and I still kick myself for having let it happen after going through a couple of similar albeit less dramatic scenarios in the past when I was even younger. It was self-inflicted torture and a subconscious refusal to just accept the situation and let go.
I was angry that I’d allowed this to happen but looking back on it now, I can see how this lady got under my skin. I met her at the tail end of a year where I’d been fighting depression and had some pretty nasty thoughts about wanting to just give up and not carry on. I was tired and had had enough so my state of mind must have been quite fragile at this point and my emotional guard very low. I do remember feeling that I’d had more than enough shit and that I felt like I deserved to pursue something positive. Ironically it turned out to be a massive neg in the end but that stressful experience became a life lesson – I can see that now in hindsight.
For you see, we all want to be that person who doesn’t have to deal with remembering the one that got away and nobody wants to feel like they lost out but the truth is that most of us WILL encounter unrequited attraction or love at some point. Perhaps you are desperate for somebody who is already spoken for or maybe you think the world of somebody who simply doesn’t view you as anything more than friends. These things happen. They hurt and they suck giant balls but it’s a form of suffering that needs to be endured and come to terms with because important lessons rise from the ashes of these unfortunate situations.
For the majority of people, this is all pretty self-explanatory or just common, subconscious “normal” behaviour anyway so you will be probably be reading this and thinking “what the fuck is this twunt banging on about?” but some of us are just wired differently or affected by our past experiences and relationships. In my case, I’ve had to learn to alter my attitude and philosophy after that particular emotional slog and while I feel that I might be “behind” in terms of society, I am glad of the emotional suffering because I learnt from it.
This brings me to the final thing I want to touch on in this post and that is about how it seems that millenials and younger people in general today appear to be determined to actively avoid this suffering and rejection. I don’t wish to tar all teenagers and those in their very early twenties with the same brush but I have seen a lot of avoidance and complete inability to cope with rejection on social media. Rather than seeing the eventual value in suffering and moving on, it seems more popular to congregate in Facebook and Twitter’s echo chambers and feed off of others’ negative emotions while contributing their own to the big mixing bowl of depression. The extreme posts I have seen such as people making suicidal statements because they were dumped or acting as if they are the only ones to ever be rejected in the history of humanity are something else. I also learned of “ghosting” and to be completely frank, that is such a heap of pathetic bullshit that should never have been given a name let alone existence as an actual concept.
It can’t be healthy for society in general if people are growing up with this entitled attitude and believing it is better for them to indulge in each other’s misery rather than growing as human beings. Perhaps it is hypocritical of myself to make these observations after taking (in my humble opinion) far too long to learn some of my own lessons but it’s another of those instances that makes me question the negative reprocussions of social media being so tightly intertwined with the lives of the younger generation.
Unfiltered Opinion 