Love is addictive; when you fall in love with someone, your body goes through several changes that encourage the production of compounds like dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin. These chemicals promote feelings of trust, pleasure, and reward, the same effects associated with addiction.
Love is one of the most beautiful yet complex emotions humans experience.
It can cause a swarm of butterflies in your stomach, boost your mood, and can change your life. But, it can also leave you feeling an immense amount of pain and heartache.
Our brain often leads us to believe that we’re in love with someone when really, we are so infatuated with the idea of them that we convince ourselves it’s love.
Here is where people often get confused; we’re often told that when you can’t let someone go, it’s because you love them so much or because they’re meant to be in your life. But, this isn’t often the case.
When you live with the idea of someone, you carry a ghost with you, a ghost that you rely on to fix your problems. This ghost warps our thoughts, causing us to become more nostalgic for things that never happened than we are grateful for the present, the things we actually have.
We begin missing things we never had, creating a false reality in our minds.
The memories and people that don’t leave your mind aren’t the ones that show you what’s meant to be; they show you what you still aren’t okay with on your own.
When we look for a partner, we look for someone to play a role. When your relationship with this person ends, you experience heartbreak. You struggle to detach because you hold onto the idea of who they could be, the perfect package that you convinced yourself they had.
Being in love with somebody you used to know is like being in love with a song or a book. You can love it all you want, but its story never changes. It says what it says, and its ending will never change no matter how tight you grasp it.
We often confuse real love with the feeling of happiness that we experience for a few weeks or months when we have fed our egos.
That’s why the relationships where you continuously go back to each other, holding onto each other, expecting a different ending, never last.
That’s why we hold onto the idea of someone because our mind turns it into what we need it to be; the idea of someone saves something in us.
The more we hold onto those fragments of that person, the thoughts of “what if,” we end up with distilled memories of them that we’ve turned into hope. But, even if you go back to them; you’ll never fully love them, you’ll always love the idea of them, the idea that things may work, the idea that they’re the one.
The truth is your relationship with them is static; it’s a memory. And holding onto them is just your way of looking for solutions to your own problems.
So next time you find yourself in love with the idea of someone, wondering why you continue to go back to each other, struggling to let go, ask yourself these simple questions:
-What will having this love fix?
-What will having this person next to me make me feel?
-What do I need to tell them?
-What do I need to hear?
-What do I need them to prove?
The idea you have in your head, the constant thought of maybe if things were different, will never amount to enough, because if they were the one, you would never have to wonder what if.
