'This explains... so much'

"We often present the idea of relationships in terms of two halves coming together to make a whole. But I think a much more apt description would be a venn diagram: two complete circles overlapping and making something even more impressive in the middle. They still retain their individual wholeness, but they share things that neither would be capable of creating on their own. You cannot come to someone else as a puzzle with a few crucial pieces missing and expect that they will fill it over with whatever spares they happen to have around. Because we are not mechanics. We are not here to fix someone’s own view of themselves, and convince them that what we see is what is real. Self-love is a complex journey requiring of just as much time and effort and attention as the love we give to someone else, and it isn’t something that we will magically find when someone just good-looking enough tells us that we should feel it.

I had to make amends with myself. I had to find my own motivation, to start something for me, and to see it through to fruition. When I told him that I couldn’t be with him, I was almost tempted to use that cloying “It’s not you, it’s me” line that everyone seems to understand and reject in equal measure. But in our case, it had some grain of truth. I had run to him because I wanted to believe that I was lovable, that I could find something, that a relationship could be my one “thing” in life that I was good at. But he was in that relationship, too, and deserved just as much back from me as he was offering. When I realized that I couldn’t give it, and likely never would be able to until I proved to myself that I was good and capable on my own, I had to leave. But that’s never easy to explain.

Sometimes we say that we met people at the wrong time. But maybe we meet them when we are the wrong person, when we have not yet met and fallen in love with ourselves. We are only half of a thing — even if we can imagine that there is a better version of us out there — and we are hoping that someone else will fill in the missing parts so that we don’t have to."