“You’re just gonna suck for a while.” And he’s right. I’ve gotten a lot of advice the last few days, and that particular insight, which also happens to be the most recent from, oh, say about 2 minutes ago, really sums it up. I’m just gonna suck for a while. There’s not much else to it. I’m going to feel awful until I don’t anymore. The thing I’ve felt the most lately has been that deep painful “yuck” that comes from someplace way down in the center of your chest, that feels like something black and ugly is being sucked right out of your body with a vacuum. It’s a pain that only one thing can deaden- not wine, not friends, not talking, not even writing about it. Time. And I hate that. Because I can’t do a damn thing about time. It does what it wants, when it wants. So I am stuck here, waiting for this to feel better. Waiting for the awful, twisty aching to go away.

I put “love” with a question mark for a few reasons. For one, I don’t know if it was love. I don’t mean on my end, because I don’t think this kind of sadness comes when you didn’t really love someone. But I will never understand how some people are able to behave when things are “over…for good this time” as though someone flipped a switch and life is business as usual. It sends you the message that maybe you weren’t as cared about as you thought if it’s that easy for them to move on and be, by all accounts, just fine.

I also question “love” because I feel like I don’t know anything about it at this point. I’ve studied it from every angle by now, honestly, I think I have. I’ve been in several long-term relationships from high school and college that were filled with intense intimacy but also the immature angst, petty arguing and insecurity that come with young relationships. I’ve been married twice to the same man, trying above all things to love him the way he deserved to be loved, but coming up short both times. I’ve loved an alcoholic unconditionally, hoping it would somehow make a difference in his life (it didn’t.) I’ve fallen for someone who wasn’t emotionally available. I’ve fallen for someone else who was unavailable – never acted on it, but developed intense emotional bonds with him that hurt just as much to sever.

And most recently I fell for someone unstable, who from day one told me he was “going to try with everything he had to not fuck this up” – presumably because he thought it was special. And maybe it was. I know that I gave it my all. I tried to be good to him no matter what. I was there for him. I bent my life around his needs, his moods, his inability to put me first, even when he acknowledged that we both knew I deserved more – that I deserved someone who wasn’t so wrapped up in their own life to really be there for me. But I convinced myself that it wasn’t important – that if I could be there for him that it would make everything ok, and that somehow it would work. I convinced myself that was a real, healthy relationship even though I was crying inside to be cared about and treated equally. I wanted my (fill in the blank….life, friends, family, interests, needs, work, ideas) to be as important to him as his were to me. I wanted to feel like if I was in a bad mood it wouldn’t jeopardize the relationship by putting more stress on him than he was already under.

But despite those things, I gave it my all. I loved him with everything I could muster up, out of the darkest mud that lingered from past hurts, out of the memories of feeling insignificant to others. Still I gave it everything I had, repeatedly. Friends said I was crazy to stay. One reminded me of the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. But I pressed on, convinced that it would somehow be ok if I just kept believing in it. I didn’t want to give up on love again. I didn’t want to accept defeat. I didn’t want to believe that based on all the evidence it was never going to work. I wanted so earnestly to believe that if we loved each other, anything was possible- that we would figure it out. And it’s because of that mantra that I subscribed to almost religiously for months, that I sit here feeling this loss, feeling raw and like I was dragged across broken sticks and cut glass, wondering how was this real love if yet again it didn’t last?

Was all this for nothing?

I don’t have the answer. I don’t know how I’m going to really know love next time. I don’t have a clue. Because I’ve discovered that it comes in all shapes and sizes, sometimes dressed up in disguise so you don’t recognize it at first, until one day you say, “Oh crap, I’m in love with this guy.” Other times it has hit me like a truck from day one. In other instances, it has grown slowly over time. Once or twice it has crept up and surprised me when I least expected it. But it has never lasted. And it’s taught me to believe one thing… things. just. don’t. last.

You can carve your initials into a tree trunk, you can tattoo their name on your arm, you can promise in front of hundreds of friends and family that you’ll love each other forever. You can swear to the other person, “I’m not going anywhere unless you ask me to.” But no one knows what that really looks like when life actually plays itself out.

Things change.

People change.

Hearts change.

Love fails us repeatedly.

Or maybe we fail at love.

And it hurts.