The Absolute Tragedy Of Watching Someone Fall Out Of Love With You

When you’re in love, it consumes you. It’s all you think about.

Even when you aren’t thinking about it, you’re still thinking about it.

Matters of the heart are a strange byproduct of the human condition. Love saturates your heart, feeds it something it never knew it needed but now is desperate to be quenched by it.

When your lover isn’t near, you want him or her. You long for your partner's touch, even when his or her hand has just left your cheek.

You are addicted to your partner's scent. You find yourself in the happiest, most exquisitely peaceful state when you lie in your partner’s bed and can smell him or her on the sheets.

You’re so happy you found someone. You finally found someone you can see yourself with forever.

Finally, the universe threw you a bone.

Every day is a beautiful adventure. The thought of it ending feels like knives...

Losing your lover begins slowly.

Everything was perfect one day, and like a shift in the seasons, suddenly a crispy chill wisps through your life, signaling a coming change.

You wake up one morning and can just sense something is different. It’s a look in his or her eyes, sudden diminished warmth, a sudden distance. There is a kind of fog between the two of you that wasn’t there before.

Suddenly, the way he or she looks at you is different, and it makes you uneasy.

You ignore it. You push it off. You tell yourself this is nothing. It’s all in your head.

It’s an echo in your heart.

There’s hollowness in everything you do. You feel like an actor in your own life, and you’re the understudy who was never supposed to play the lead.

You are constantly on the edge of tears. You crave his or her love so emphatically it hurts. You feel the desperation hot and sticky on your skin. It feels like shame to need love so badly.

The loss is like an echo in your heart, a growing chasm that shows no sign of stopping.

The walls crumble away like mountain terrain before an impending avalanche.

It’s a slow process, moving in increments from day to day, the wound growing deeper and deeper, each moment more infected and festering than the last.

Your partner is disappearing.

You can feel him or her fading. It’s just a palpable loss. He or she just doesn’t seem interested in you anymore.

Gone are the small declarations of affection, the sweet unexpected kisses on street corners and shy reaches for your hand. Gone are the looks of tender, childlike wonder you once delighted in so fully.

So, you try to love enough for both of you. You show him or her affection twice as much; you kiss your partner as often as you can, hold him or her as much as you can.

You try to breathe your love into your partner, hoping if it can somehow reach him or her, it will warm his or her heart, and he or she will come back to you.

You replace sex with intimacy.

You try to have sex with him or her as much as you can. You hunger for your partner's touch. Sex is the only time you feel truly connected to your partner.

It's the only time he or she feels engaged with you. What you lack in emotional intimacy, you replace with physical intimacy. You long for any kind of connection and will do anything to get it.

When your partner's heart first pulled away, it felt like all of his or her color faded from the world, as if you were seeing him or her the same way you see characters on low-quality television.

Then your partner’s color progressed to grey shadows. He or she became smoke in your hands, as you tried to hold on with all of your might, to capture him or her in a net of your devotion.

You feel so utterly powerless.

It’s all so frustrating. You could tear your hair from your head. You wonder what you could possibly do to save this and think about how, if you could have loved your partner just a little bit more, this might not have happened.

You feel lost and worthless.

It breaks your heart to have to accept there is nothing you can do, and there is nothing you could have done.

Hot tears trail down your cheeks as you realize this person is never going to love you the way you want him or her to love you.

As wonderful as he or she may have seemed and how greatly you believed and invested in this love, it is not going to work out.

Being single again is scary.

The thought of going back on Tinder and accepting dinner invitations from strangers and creeps is almost too disheartening to bear.

Being thrown back into the world of singledom means going home to an empty apartment every night, reacquainting yourself with a radical social life and going back to old routines. It’s daunting.

It’s one of the reasons you hold on. You don’t want to venture back into that untamed, often vicious land.

It’s about liberating yourself.

It's tough when you give someone all your love and hope with all of your heart that it’s going to lead somewhere great, and then you find out this person is not who you thought he or she was.

The truth is, he or she is never going to be what you want. That may be the hardest thing to come to terms with.

Not to be trite, but he or she was, in fact, a Monet: so splendid and perfect for you from afar, but close up, he or she turns out to be so wrong.

There was so much good there, and yet, it wasn’t the right kind of good. The puzzle piece seemed like it was going to fit, but it just doesn’t.

It's more the sadness and desperate disappointment of not attaining what could have been that makes this situation so difficult.

Life always seems to be a gigantic "could have been," no? But you have to end it because there is no coming back from it.

He or she just isn’t going to get there. Not how you imagined. Ever.

For all the hollowness you feel at suddenly being alone, you can still feel a sense of liberation.

You can be happy knowing you've freed yourself to find someone who will truly love you the way you deserve to be loved.

Because, even if you don’t feel this way right now, you truly do deserve to be loved.