Lessons from a certified disaster

No one told me that love would lowkey ruin me this many times. Multiple failed relationships, one unrequited obsession that lived rent-free in my head for way too long, a whole ass marriage that crashed and burned, and I'm currently sitting in that special kind of hell where someone you love needs his space, but he can take as long as he needs (I'm positive he would do the same thing if I ever need my own me time).

Well, living the dream, honestly. Here's what the damage taught me.

I wish I could go back in time to reprogram my brain. Or at the very least, sit my younger self down and say "Dude, no, don't do dat." But since time travel isn't a thing yet, here's the next best option, a fucking list.

1. Love is just not enough.

This is the one that broke my whole worldview, ngl.

Younger me deadass thought being in love = happily ever after. No notes, no asterisks, just sparks fly and fireworks forever. Cute. Delulu, but cute.

Then reality punched me in the face. Hard. Because it's a fact that you can love someone completely and still be fundamentally incompatible. Sparks and chemistry only carry the relationship so far before life asks harder questions.

Here's what nobody tells me: loving someone AND wanting to build a life with them are NOT the same thing. They have to exist in the same place at the same time, or it just... doesn't work.

I know I can love him forever. That part's easy. The part that matters is; I want to be with him forever. And that distinction? That took me years and a lot of damage to understand.

2. I'm not just marrying a person.

I'm also marrying his childhood. His family. His weakness and his illness. His trauma and his coping mechanisms and his weird little habits he doesn't even know he has.

I'm marrying the way he puts a ridiculously huge amount of food in his mouth and then chews slowly, silently, lips sealed tight, staring without blinking at the plate, like an absolute sociopath. The way he genuinely enjoys washing dishes like it's a hobby. The way he delivers facts with such intensity that I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of rusty blades, word by word. Painful, but they're undisputed facts.

The good, the bad, the ugly, the inexplicable. All of it.

And he? He's signing up for the whole non-refundable package of my unhinged self too. Every version of me, every piece of baggage I've bubble-wrapped and dragged along.

That's not scary. That's just the actual deal. 

3. Shared values. Or lack thereof.

Here's the bare minimum requirement: you have to actually agree on something fundamental. In our case, him and me both think the human race is, broadly speaking, deeply despicable. 

Aww romantic, I know.

But here's where it gets complicated.. Values aren't static. Mine definitely weren't.

I was a chronic people pleaser until maybe three years ago. I left my faith six years back. And if I'm being fully honest? I grew up racist. Like, genuinely. My mom's advice was kalau jumpa ular dengan orang India, pukul India dulu. I avoided Chinese people because they stank of garlic. I carried all of that like it was normal because it was normal, in my world, at that time, and that's how I was taught and programmed for 40 plus years.

I'm not offering that as an excuse. I'm offering it as context. People are products of their environment until they CHOOSE not to be.

Which brings me to the actual question, not "do we share the same values right now" but "do we want the same kind of life, now and in the future?" That one's harder. And more important.

4. People change. And also sometimes absolutely do not.

Here's the thing nobody wants to admit, you CANNOT love someone into becoming a different version of a person you'd imagine them to be. I know. I tried. I have the divorce papers to prove it.

When I married my ex, I genuinely believed that love was like...umm a character upgrade? Yes.

I thought that proximity or closeness to someone who cared (me) would naturally make that idiot level up. That we'd both grow old together with my perfect version of that asshat that I fantasized in my head finally becomes real.

And look, sometimes that does happen. Beautiful, good for them, congratz.

But for me, I was watering a dead plant for almost a decade and calling it gardening.

People's feelings also shift when reality doesn't match the fantasy they built in their head. Instead of sitting with the discomfort and actually working through it, a lot of people just bail. Or even worse, stay exactly the same. Being fundamentally lazy is easy. Staying lazy is a privilege because you KNOW that someone will always cleans up after you.

My out-of-touch ass thought love meant we'd both change for the better.

Huge. Fucking. Mistake.

Learn not to change your significant half, but do better in leveling up yourself.

5. Learn how not to be cruel.

Fights in a relationship are inevitable. Not a maybe, not a sometimes, it's fucking guaranteed. 

You both will disagree. You both will irritate each other. You will have days where the way they chew their food is somehow offensive to the point you want to murder them in their sleep.

That's normal. That's just Tuesday.

The real test isn't whether you fight, it's whether you fight fair. Because when the rose-tinted filter wears off and real life sets in, frustration needs somewhere to go. And the person closest to you becomes the easiest target.

I have to actively remind myself, he is not my emotional punching bag. And I am not his. We are supposed to be on the same team, even when we're driving each other absolutely insane.

Being in love doesn't give either of us the right to be unkind. Full stop.

6. Stop bottling up feelings. Seriously.

I love hard. I'd give my all. But I also have a mean streak that lives rent free somewhere in my chest, waiting. Tick-fucking-tock.

Here's how it goes: someone does me wrong. I forgive. They do it again. I forgive. Third time, fifth time, ninth time, still swallowing it down with a smile like it's fine, it's totally fine, everything is fine.

And then the umpteenth time?

I detonate.

Suddenly I'm the villain. The seething, poison-spitting, unhinged one. People see the explosion and assume that's my default setting. Oh that's her true colours, that is who she has always been. They conveniently forget the nine times I said nothing. The grace I extended over and over again.

They only remember the bomb going off. Not how long the fuse was.

The problem was never my anger. The problem was letting things fester so long that when it finally came out, it came out ugly.

Say the thing early. Say it kindly whenever we can, honestly if you can't, sleep on it. Try again tomorrow.

7. We are not the same people we were. And that's okay.

My 30-year-old self would absolutely lose her SHIT if she saw me now. Abandoned faith? Check. No longer defending a toxic ex? Yep. Somehow in a relationship where him and me bond over how deeply weird and morbid we both are? Big check.

Six years ago I was a total simp for someone I hadn't even met yet. He broke my heart and we weren't even dating. Three years ago I was still making excuses for someone who didn't deserve them. And now? Still learning. Still forgetting. Still finding out things that got lost somewhere on the way to my hippocampus. Start over. Learn again.

People change. That's not a betrayal, that's just life, doing its thingy thing.

My goal is to love every new version of him. And I want us to meet those new versions of each other with curiosity instead of resentment.

Because growing apart is a choice. Growing together is too.

8. We have to work as a team.

This sounds obvious until here I am,  actually living in it.

We win challenges together. We lose battles together. Face the weird, ugly, exhausting parts of life together. That's the deal. And honestly? If I actually get this right, him and me could conquer kingdoms. Or the void. Whatever comes first.

But here's my confession, this is the part I struggle with the most.

He gives the best advice. Rational, clear, non-nonsense, actual facts, backed up by research. Zero emotional influence. The kind that actually makes sense even when I don't want it to. "He's always right."

But when it's my turn? I freeze. I second guess myself. I convince myself that my input doesn't matter, that he probably thinks my perspective is irrelevant, that I should just nod along.

Which is insane because he's never actually said that. Not once.

That's the thing about insecurity, it's very loud and very convincing and completely made up most of the time. It's not him. It's me. And that's something I have to work on, not just for us, but for myself.

A team only works if both people show up. I'm still learning how to fully show up.

9. Never. EVER. Lie.

This is the department I failed so miserably.

I lied. Smol, little, big lies, doesn't matter but enough lies that it quietly changed something between us. The trust shifted. The dynamic changed. And I had to sit with the fact that I did that.

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand why I did it. I read, I did research, went into a deep dive the whole psychology of it. I decided I'm not a pathological liar. I found the answers, not excuses, answers. But I'm also aware that the difference between those two things is hard to explain to someone who got extremely hurt by it.

I can't unbreak what I already broke. I know that.

But I'm done lying. Not as a promise to him, as a promise to myself. Because I'm tired of being someone who does that. That's not who I want to be anymore.

10. Little things matter. Big gestures are a scam.

At 21, I was absolutely shocketh when a boy showed up with a bunch of roses just to ask me to be his girlfriend. Cinematic. Romantic. I was sold.

He was my first love, my first everything and he was a master of dramatic grand gestures. He set the bar. I was loving the attention. And that's exactly how I got played. 

Speed it up to 10 years later. That jackass wasn't as dramatic but how that walking red flag lovebombed me with constant little gestures, series of bare minimum efforts disguised as something nice to do to me had me on chokehold. Bought me food when I was upset. Threw money at the end of every complaint just to shut me up. Dazzled me with enough sparkle that I stopped noticing that asswipe never actually listened. It was a distraction. A way of saying "look over here" so I never looked too closely at what was actually missing.

My current partner is different.

He doesn't do grand. He does quiet. He does surprises. And somehow that quiet gets me every time. A small gesture here, a moment of care there, things he probably doesn't even think twice about. He rubbed my feet and I guarantee for him it was just another boring Tuesday. He showered me, fed me, babied me, took care of me like I was some sort of this fragile thing that should be protected from the cruel world, paid attention to me, without even thinking, almost spontaneous.

For me it felt like being loved in a way I didn't know I was allowed to have.

That's the thing about little things, they're not little at all. They're actually everything.

There's more where this came from. Unfortunately, my brain has a very aggressive delete button so this is what survived. 

I'm gonna take what's useful, leave what isn't, and I can't wait to go hug my person again ❤️