Associate opinion editor Joshua Abraham

The pitfalls of trying to love

In my 22 years of living, I have never been in a romantic relationship. Sure, there have been opportunities, but every time I have tried to get to know someone, I’ve ended up in the same place I started. 

And I hate to report that it’s all been my fault. I’m the reason why I’m single. It’s not that being single is a bad thing, but I have jeopardized every situation I put myself in, and I can’t place blame anywhere other than on my own doing.

Every situation has started the same: I get to know someone and really like them. We share the same similarities and passions, and it seems we could be a good fit; they might be someone I’m interested in pursuing. 

But then it veers down a path of utter pain and despair. Just when I think everything is going great, my insecurities start to bubble up, telling me not to trust this person or that I should be overanalyzing anything and everything they do. One brick is quickly laid on top of another in a wall that only keeps growing higher, held together by the mortar of my self-doubt. 

I let my insecurities get the best of me. I implode and lash out at them. Then they do the same because the best defense is always a good offense. It’s a bloodbath, and we come out of it with battle wounds, emotional scars and the realization that we shouldn’t be talking to each other anymore. 

When those aforementioned bricks began to build up over time to create this wall that keeps me out of a relationship, it was because I couldn’t show the other person that I had a problem, whether with them or myself. No one wants to face problems; where’s the fun in that? Everyone wants to live their lives without hardship, hoping to bury their insecurities and praying that they don’t rise to the surface. 

But that isn’t the way life goes. 

Modern love has been built on maintaining a certain perception that you should always be the best version of yourself if you want to be in a relationship. I always thought that you should be the “picture-perfect” person for someone, that character from the movies who every woman sees and says, “I want someone like him because he has no flaws, or at least none that I can find.” 

But, again, that isn’t real life, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to realize it. 

I am plagued with insecurities that are bound to come out in any relationship; it’s just something I can’t avoid. I have trust issues, I yell when I get frustrated, I have no confidence, I dissociate from everything when things get difficult — these aren’t things that make me the perfect partner I want to be, but it’s what makes me human, albeit a broken one. 

I used to think that once these parts of me did appear and cause havoc, a “game over” screen would pop up, taking me back to the starting page to create a new character and try again with someone else. But this is where the story actually starts, where people get to see the real me. 

I’m not saying that I should go around being the worst version of myself — that couldn’t be further from the truth. But when I do implode or get frustrated, instead of hitting the quit button, I should communicate with them, tell them I’m sorry this happened, that I want to be better. That I will try to prevent this from happening again, because they deserve someone who only wants to be the best version of themself.

I didn’t have to quit the game; it was just a level within it. My insecurities didn’t define me; they allowed me to become better. 

When I get to my wedding day, and I see the woman whom I will have tied the knot with for the rest of my life, I hope that she loves me for who I truly am, not who I want her to think I am — because I want to love her for everything she is. 

All her good and bad, her intelligence and stubbornness. What gets her through the day and what makes her cry during the night. It’s her complete self that I truly want to love. Why wouldn’t I do the same, show the same vulnerability? Why wouldn’t I want to work toward a better version of myself, as ugly as that may be? Why would I conceal this part of myself if that’s what I expect from my partner?

This starts way before my day of matrimony. I have learned that I must accept these parts of myself, that the ones I’ve wanted to hide shouldn’t be neglected. My insecurities are a part of me, but I want to solve them. It shouldn’t only be a reason for me to explode, but rather a reason to get better. 

I went through college attaching these insecurities to every relationship I was in, then wondering why people didn’t want to be with me after I blew up. In turn, I knew I had these insecurities, so I thought I couldn’t show them. But what if I just tried to become a better person instead of calling it quits? 

Maybe that’s what’s most important: improvement. We aren’t the perfection we desire to be, the gods we strive toward; we’re the people who come into the church to be healed, praying for our feeble little hearts to be purified.

My affirmation is that even though it might be difficult, ugly or painful, there’s beauty in trying to become better. There’s beauty in wanting to improve even when you feel you can’t. Because we should all strive to be the partners we want to become for each other, even if we aren’t right now. 

If you’re trying to build a house, where do you start? Do you start at the roof and work your way down, or do you set a foundation and go up? 

Addressing your wounds, insecurities and pain is your foundation. It’s time to build upward.

Joshua Abraham is a kinesiology senior and associate opinion editor for The Battalion.

Senior opinion columnist Isabella Garcia

Don’t feel love, choose it

For as long as I can remember, love was a sort of spell, something that made my heart race and left a warm ache all over. 

But really, for me to be loved was to be watched; I imagined some boy was obsessed with me, so I became obsessed with myself. 

Though I’ve had eight years of relationship experience, for the vast majority of that time, my ideas of love were nothing more than romanticized delusions, contrived out of an illusory grasp on the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of my lonely existence. 

Granted, it makes sense that my younger self gave in so easily to such superficial notions. What else could I have expected when they were shaped by the inexorable passion of “Twilight,” the gorgeous damsel who literally just waited around and yearned in “Sleeping Beauty” or the happily ever after of “Cinderella”? She’s someone I hope I’ve outgrown, of course, but whom I still recognize with pity and mirth. 

I’ve come to understand that love is not passive, something to suddenly “fall into” or “out of” based on fleeting emotions and the fanciful pinings of adolescence: It’s a perpetually active pursuit, a decision one must make every day. 

It should come as no surprise that I have no patience for deterministic sentiments, and I adamantly maintain that the foundation of loving someone lies in endeavoring to. 

So when I hear countless relationships end because of “losing the spark” or someone “deserving better,” I am filled with frustration. It would be more accurate to say that the relationship didn’t end; it failed. The former implies it was due to circumstances beyond your control and evades culpability, but the latter acknowledges you have the agency to prevent that from happening. 

If you’ve lost the connection that previously tethered your souls — if there even is such a thing — what’s preventing you from finding it once more? Wherever did the ridiculous notion that this all-consuming and arguably life-altering experience was supposed to be easy come from? 

And if you find that your partner still deserves better, then be better — stop circumventing accountability by saying you “can’t” and just admit that you won’t.  

I would be remiss, however, not to acknowledge that our nature is mutable; the human experience a constant state of becoming. So, how do we reconcile loving someone with the inevitability that this someone isn’t permanent? In other words, how can we love someone if we don’t ever really know who they are?

There are two answers: Either we can never truly love anyone — which is fundamentally antithetical to my existentialist beliefs and the agency to be derived from them — or our understanding of what it means to “know” someone must be flexible. 

I opt for the second option — shocker — but I think we’re much more inclined to accept it regardless. 

Everyone navigates the unknown in their daily lived experiences, doing their best to accept that they must make decisions in the face of inevitable uncertainty. Refusal to do so is simply impractical — how could you expect to get anything done otherwise? It would be a veritable paralysis. 

Think of all the things you trust in your life: religion, stop signs, institutions of authority, family, friends. But just as trust can only exist because of — and not despite — uncertainty, loving is not only knowing, but also being able to not know. 

I mean, how we portray ourselves, which is who we are to some extent — whether we admit it or not — varies depending on who or what we’re surrounded by. And if those situations are always changing at any given moment, can we honestly say we even know ourselves?

So it must be that knowing someone isn’t compatible with a rigid definition of them, as though they were merely an object. Rather, it seems to be broader; it’s more abstract and better explained, perhaps, by likening it to understanding them. 

Understanding what it means to love is futile, therefore, without first being able to understand whom you love. 

Out of all the interactions I’ve had throughout my life, there came times when I felt loved because I was understood. Whether it was something I did, maybe something I said, for a moment, they caught me in their look; however briefly, who I was became captured in their understanding of me. 

They saw me.

And so, you can never assume that your partner is the same person the next morning simply because you went to sleep next to them the night before. Always remember to be curious, mindful of how they’re changing and why. 

To love someone is therefore to understand them; to see them even when you don’t recognize them. It is up to each of us, however, to ensure that doing so never comes at the cost of loving ourselves. 

Isabella Garcia is an economics senior and senior opinion columnist for The Battalion.