Category: Limerence

I had a dream right before I woke up this morning. In it, an old friend and long lost crush appeared and reconciled with me, apparently because someone else had pretended to be me and contacted her via some email or message that somehow made things better.

It was a weird dream, and I’m not sure it makes any sense, but I felt like it reminded me of her again. She’s a girl from my past. I wrote some vague blog entries a while back about her. We never actually dated. It was unrequited love nonsense of the stupidest kind.

I did a lot of stupid things and managed to alienate her from me. It’s a long story, and probably not worth getting into here. Suffice to say, I still think about her, still wish her well, still wonder how she’s doing. I regret a lot of things, but I also hope that, somehow, the experience helped her grow and succeed in life in other ways.

Emotions are foolish, I guess. At times the thing I want more than anything else in the world is just to reconcile, to even be able to speak to her again. As old friends whose paths diverged long ago.

But, I don’t deserve that. I know I don’t. And I’m afraid if I tried to reach out again, she’d just block me.

What do I want? Why do I feel? What’s the point of all this?

I sometimes think, if I had more agency, I would just contact her in a more straightforward, honest manner, and work things out like an adult. Most likely she’d just ignore me, or say some angry things, but at least we’d be going somewhere.

I tried in therapy a while back to get some help with moving on. My therapist actually suggested I write a letter, but not send it, and then write what I think her response would be. I balked at that. I didn’t want to put words in her mouth.

They say that things that happen in your 20s leave a stronger impression…

It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, but it matters to each of us. So, I continue to wait for something that will never happen. I continue to dream about something I don’t deserve.

The reality is that I made mistakes and lost a good friend. The consequences of life actions need to matter. As John Green put it, “the world is not a wish-granting factory”. So, the right thing to do, sometimes, is nothing at all.

Where to start. When I was younger, I had a tendency to become infatuated with one particular girl at any given time. Three such infatuations in my life basically, and I’m only slightly exaggerating here, destroyed me for years.

The problem with infatuations, particularly of the unrequited love kind, is that they are fundamentally unfair to everyone involved. To you, the obsessed, you lose all sense of perspective and feel powerless against the draw of this girl who all your thoughts and feelings now orbit around. To the beloved, well, your obsessive attention is just creepy if she finds out about it. Though, perhaps you’re like me and managed to somehow be simultaneously a tsundere and a yandere. Both are actually very unhealthy archetypes, and the combination is just bad. To other people, you are devoting absurd amounts of effort and attention at one girl, and your other platonic relationships suffer as a result.

Infatuations are fundamentally unhealthy. Even if she did reciprocate, the power dynamics in the relationship would be completely unbalanced. She would have all the power, and if she is a decent person, that’s not a comfortable position to be in. It takes emotional maturity to recognize that a good, healthy relationship respects boundaries and strives towards an equality of power.

Infatuations of this type tend to stem from admiring someone from afar without actually getting to know them well enough to recognize that their little foibles are actually serious flaws that they need to work on. They tend to create unrealistic impressions that put the girl on a pedestal and place her in an impossible position with expectations she cannot possibly meet in real life. This is seriously not the kind of pressure you should place on anybody, much less the girl you like.

Having said all that, I basically managed to become infatuated three times, once in high school, once in undergrad, and once in grad school. The first two lasted until the next, and the last one managed to cling to me for more than a decade even through actual relationships I had with other girls. In some sense they all left a residual impression on me. I still hide feelings in me, that sometimes I can access when I reminisce about the past. Useless emotions that I don’t know what to do with, so I just lock them in a metaphorical box in the deepest recesses of my soul.

For the record, I’m married now and have a child. For all intents and purposes, these things should best be forgotten. And yet, I’m writing about it now. I guess this is yet another attempt at catharsis.

With hindsight, what I truly regret is that I allowed myself to sabotage cherished friendships with girls I actually cared about to the altar of the infatuation. It prevented me from seeing things clearly, from acting reasonably, from being normal and treating these people like regular human beings rather than some idol, or object of fear.

The pattern that emerged was basically that I’d meet the girl, develop a crush that would explode into infatuation and unrequited love, alienate the girl with my chaotic and counterproductive behaviour (alternating between extreme and obvious avoidance/pushing away and extreme and unwanted attention), and after she stopped talking to me I’d usually get super depressed and probably suicidal at points. Rinse and repeat. Needless to say, my studies during these times suffered immensely. My other friendships and relationships suffered. I was useless and pathetic and generally insufferable.

My advice to you, dear reader, is to avoid infatuations like the plague. They kill the friendships you care most about. They feel great at first, but are a poisoned chalice. You are better off not allowing them to happen. I recognized this was a problem after the first time. And yet it happened again. And again. Each time I swore I’d do things differently, and to be honest, things did play out slightly differently each time. But at the end of the day, the overall result was about the same.

It took a certain realization that my whole hopeless romantic dreamer shtick was a big part of the problem. It took realizing that I was exceedingly unrealistic and foolish. It took recognizing that I was sacrificing actual potential relationships on this altar of my infatuation. It took telling a beautiful girl I was dating that I wasn’t in love with her because I still had feelings for someone else, and seeing her cry, to realize how messed up it all was.

It’s easier said than done, but fight the urge to be infatuated. If you’re the type to develop it, fight it with all your strength, for the actual sake of your would be beloved. Recognize the opportunity cost of casting your devotion and loyalty after a girl who isn’t interested, while ignoring all the others who actually like you. Be willing to instead satisfice and choose someone who you can actually be happy with, in a healthy, reasonable relationship.

The heart never listens. Words fail me.

But the truth is I need to stop this.

I’m sorry.

I remember the lights. It was a night downtown walking with friends. We had this way of ignoring the traffic lights and narrowly averting disaster. I felt alive. It was silly…

I remember the snow. My hands were freezing, but these cardboard boxes needed to be flattened or else we’d all get into trouble later I thought. You were inside, dancing with him I guess. Much later he told me that he’d really meant it when he told you he and his ex were done, and it wasn’t just a temporary thing at the time that she later claimed. I think he didn’t realize I had no way of telling you this tidbit by that point…

I remember waking up and seeing your silhouette outside of the kitchen screen door for some reason. The dinner the previous night had not digested well and I ran to the washroom. Sorry for not letting you in when you were trapped outside for a while. This was after that Durarara marathon, where we’d slept on couches since it had been so late. I think I accidentally stepped on the cat that night as I was fumbling in the dark. Poor cat. He seemed confused…

I remember being angry when it turned out the assignment required more memory than your poor laptop could handle. I honestly respected that you wanted to look through the code and try to understand it and make it your own. The perfume though was a bit strong. I could smell it even from across the room…

I remember when you meowed back at me. We were at my place surrounded by friends getting ready to watch some anime and I took you by surprise by meowing at you in the first place…

I remember when we first met at the bubble tea event. I’d seen your picture on the Facebook group before, but this was the first time in person. The Star Trek movie was on in the background, and a bunch of the folks I’d learn to call friends for a time were there…

I remember the last time you said anything to me in person. It was after a different bubble tea event two years later. You told me you didn’t appreciate the talks we’d had and wasn’t interested in another one, and walked off. It took a while for me to process what you’d said, and by then you were gone…

I remember the first Halloween party. The time I was a ninja and showed off my martial arts prowess with a wooden sword in a small park. You were dressed in a sorta elegant gothic lolitaish dress. Alas, despite being a ninja, I didn’t know how to dance…

I remember at another Halloween event, while holding the door for everyone, exhausted from the day of turning cardboard boxes and garbage bags into a haunted house, someone touched my hand as she went past. I still don’t know who that was, and it probably doesn’t matter now…

I remember the day I lost your trust. You’d already printed out the form I’d asked you to print for me and didn’t even look at what was on it, since it was technically confidential tax stuff. I was standing in your room, complaining about stupid emo things that didn’t matter even back then. You kept saying if I trusted you, I’d say what I wanted to say. So I put my hand on the stack of journals on your lap and said something. Not really what I wanted to say to be honest. I couldn’t say that. To let you know I was deeply, madly in love with you back then…

I remember when we went together to the Durarara cosplay meetup at the convention. After the old cellphones were broken to bits to re-enact that scene, I told people the next Dollars mission was to clean things up for the environment, then promptly went to a photoshoot rather than staying and helping like I really should have to set a better example…

I remember meeting you at the sushi restaurant. I’d gotten there early and made a bunch of blue roses out of crafting paper from a store nearby, thinking this was such a good idea for some reason. You didn’t seem impressed. I remember generally being an idiot back then, and not taking the rejection well…

I remember you wanting to be the next Marie Curie. I think I mentioned this to a certain mutual friend shortly before a certain game of Apples-To-Apples…

I remember being annoyed that the PSP was so expensive that even with all the donations they covered only half the cost, as this was before the price drop. The most important thing was that it came from the club, and not from me. I gave you a less impressive throwaway present at the same time to try to make it seem this way. You seemed very happy when you opened the present from the club. I ran away and didn’t see the rest of what happened though…

I remember you standing at the front of the classroom. I remember how you could command the attention of everyone in the room, even though you were talking about something like Vocaloid fandoms…

I remember karaoke. You sang songs in Japanese that I couldn’t. I sang dumb emo English songs because back then that was all I knew…

I remember that you wanted to make sure your distant future child if it was a boy would read some girls’ literature so he could understand the female mind and experience…

I remember you said your dad’s bible was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. You recommended it to me, and I read it eventually. I learned what synergy really means from that book…

I remember thinking for some reason it would be a good idea to get you a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, even though it was probably, in retrospect, not something you would find tasteful…

I remember walking through a museum, wishing that I had gone with you instead of on my own. For some reason I thought the dark, morbid exhibit would interest you somehow. I think my state of mind wasn’t great at that point…

I remember reading your LiveJournal and feeling empathy towards your daily struggles, but never being self-confident enough to reach out and show that I cared…

I remember being an awkward, cringey person. You were as kind to me as you could be, all things considered…

I remember you because you left a deep impression on me. And for that, I’m grateful to have crossed paths. Thank you. I’m sorry I wasn’t the good friend you deserved. I’ve done my best to try to be better since then. You helped me become who I am now. Again, thank you.

It’s a strange thing. Despite everything, there’s still a part of me that cares about how she’s doing these days. Why her? Of all the people in the world, why is it that I worry about how she feels now?

I love my wife very much, but I also know exactly how she’s doing now, so it doesn’t bother me like it does with this person. This person who for all intents and purposes abandoned me as a friend a decade ago. Any sane person would have long ago given up hope to reconcile. Like, I know that events in your twenties supposedly leave a deeper impression or something. Maybe that’s it?

Or maybe I feel residual responsibility for not representing what I believed in well, and so I worry she learned the wrong lessons and came to the wrong conclusions because I failed as an example. That seems, kinda arrogant though, to think that my small failures would leave much of an impression on someone who I knew to be strong-willed and principled in her outlook.

Or maybe it’s the strange things I’ve heard that suggest she took it particularly badly. Of course, every attempt I’ve made to reach out has only made things worse, so I don’t even know if there’s anything I can reasonably do to alleviate things.

And… I don’t trust myself to read the tea leaves in an unbiased way. I have a history of reading too much into small signs that in truth meant nothing.

So, I’m left with just a sense of loss and guilt. It’s my fault that things got this way in the first place. Ultimately, I must bear the consequences of my foolish youth. I won’t say that the feelings are all gone, but at this point, I mostly just miss my friends. Technically both of them, though they are not sisters. It’s a long story, and not one I think is worth bringing up in any sort of detail on a post like this.

I guess I also have a nagging worry about certain other people who may have had ill intentions and could have contributed to things, though I can’t confirm with certainty whether this was the case. Regardless, it was my fault that I handled the whole situation poorly.

I suppose that’s the thing. An apology never properly spoken. A wish to at least let her know what she perhaps fears isn’t true. A way to clear the air and fix possible misunderstandings. This is what I want. But I know I don’t deserve it.

Or maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I was wrong about her. That could explain a lot. But for some reason I cling to the faith in my former friends, that they are decent people and wouldn’t go that far. Honestly though, I can’t know for certain. I can only hope it’s a misunderstanding that’s just spiralled out of control.

A misunderstanding I enabled by being unreliable and inconsistent in the first place. I can’t control what others think or do, but I should have done better than I did. I lost her trust. That was my fault. If that didn’t happen, everything could have been figured out better. I could have asked about the thing that made me paranoid, and found out the probably mundane reason for it. Regrettably, I let things spiral into chaos and confusion instead.

And then I continued to do some really dumb things that just made things worse. The rest is history.

So, what does it mean? It means I get hung up on past regrets easily. It means sometimes there’s no way forward. Life can be painfully indifferent in that way. And people suffer for your mistakes, and you can do nothing to help them. This is a dark reality. The truth of the brutality of the universe.

I normally try to somehow turn this around to say something I think is inspiring, but sometimes it’s just impossible. You’re put in impossible situations with no good way out. Except to let go and move on, I guess. The universe is not a wish granting machine. It is a pile of stuff that occasionally moves and fights you for the limited amount of energy present. That we are able to push together a remotely satisfactory life out of this struggle is to be applauded I suppose. But we can’t always get what we want.

Sometimes problems evolve to the point where there is just no solution. In which case, one should focus on other problems instead. But it doesn’t feel great.