Bad dreams
Dreaming of someone you loved is always traumatic. I should specify – someone whom you fell for, and loved unrequitedly. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life in unrequited love. At school, a boy I felt strongly for at the time, though I wouldn’t say now I loved him. Then Michael, who I got to know when I was 18, and continued caring for deeply until my mid-20s. At the end of my 20s I became friends with, and then fell for, another guy, David, who only definitively turned me down after nearly 2 1/2 years, 1 1/2 years ago (and so has occupied 4 years of my life).
It’s this last guy I dreamt of this morning. And it was a typical dream of this type – I met him, saw him, searched for him, and only caught glimpses, exchanged a few words, and was otherwise kept apart from. There was a lot going on, lots of people milling around, but the part that I remember was a sort-of school hall dance combined with a Mediterranean outdoor nightclub. He was there, and I asked him to get me a drink (I’d not had any, I was busy elsewhere); he agreed, but was already drunk, and I think topless. Magnificent, but insouciant, and later I looked for him (and my drink!), and couldn’t find him. There were other boys there, young and beautiful, and I knew I could never compete, wouldn’t even try.
When I love someone, lust after them, I know they are out of my league. If I think they are attractive and worthy of my affection, then I know I am unworthy of theirs. It is inevitable. I have never valued myself, always found myself repulsive (whether fat or thin, gym-goer or couch potato), and so it is a natural law that I cannot be worthy of someone I think so highly of. So the dream tapped into that. Even if he’d said yes in real life, and we had tried to make it work, I would no doubt have been crippled by doubt and fear – that I was holding him back, that he could do better. Not that I wouldn’t have trusted him, but I wouldn’t have blamed him if he started to look elsewhere. He knew better, never fell into that trap.
How long will it take me to get over this guy? In some ways I was closer to him than Michael – we talked about a wider range of subjects, more frequently. We texted almost every day for a couple of years. And we touched on intimate subjects. Michael was very reserved in some ways – or maybe he just never saw me that way, whereas David did, at least for a time. I nearly fell for another guy, Dan, just after David broke my heart, but he too has hurt me, and I haven’t allowed myself to become so attached. But my experience is that the only way to get over one love is to find another. The other road – allowing the embers to gradually cool, and the feelings become detached – takes years. But finding a new love is just postponing the hurt, because they too will be unable to give you what you want. Other people manage to find a partner, start a relationship. Even if it ends, they find another. I never have. It’s always one-sided. At this point in my life, I have no reason to think it’ll ever be any different. So I just want an end to feelings in general. I could cut myself off from new people, preventing anyone coming along that I might fall for, or at least only get to know women and married, middle aged men.
People (invariably those who haven’t faced this kind of adulthood) say not to give up hope. But hope causes hurt. And there’s no upside. You get hurt in relationships too, but you get affection and happy times. Unrequited love is a fantasy – and can bring comfort in its own way – but any happiness derived from it is illusory. It is a poison.