On perceived connections
Writing about this seems to be useful, both for me and some other people, so more on breakup pain:
The fact is that I don’t have very much experience of long relationships, and that I haven’t had many deep friendships either. At this moment I feel like I only have one really deep friendship, and I don’t get to see that person nearly as often as I’d like. I’ve long had a deep feeling of loneliness and being alone.
When I started hanging out with this person… she was unique. Now, of course when you get infatuated with someone new, they always seem unique and perfect and special. But even looking back at it with more objective eyes now, it still feels unique. Even before I’d really developed any strong crush, even when my attitude was still just “I like this person and they seem like there could be some potential”, on our first date there was already something magical.
We shared interests and values, but that’s true for a lot of people. What was so special was the almost instant feeling of connection. I can with confidence say that I have never in my life had any interaction with anyone go that smoothly and pleasantly.
On that first date, there was never a moment of awkwardness or being unsure of what to say; not the slightest feeling of unease. It felt completely, utterly, entirely safe; I confessed to some private things which I had intended to leave until later, because it felt entirely inconceivable to my intuition that she would react badly to them (and she didn’t). Conversation seemed to flow completely smoothly and naturally, the topics moving from sex to religion, from religion to the subjective nature of reality, from there to the academic study of gaming, from there to the probability of two people sharing a birthday.
I’ve never felt such a feeling of understanding and being understood, of everything just… clicking. And if this was just the first date, how deep and rich could our relationship yet become?
It - and several other early interactions - were enough that I was ready to move to an unfamiliar town and leave basically my entire existing social circle behind in order to have that on a regular basis. It was enough that, if there would have been any other incompatibilities, I would have been ready to put in practically any amount of work in order to smooth them out.
And I thought that this feeling of already being totally committed to it - despite how little time had passed - and being ready to invest practically anything in it to make it work and maintain that magic smoothness, was mutual.
That mistaken assumption on my part ended up shaping - and damaging - much of our interaction when things started going less well.
By the time the relationship was practically over already, I heard her characterize it as “a brief thing of a few months”, not worth putting inordinate amounts of energy into if it looked like things weren’t going very well.
Not that magic, unique thing that I - maybe foolishly - had thought it was.
And now the next pain and fear that I need to process is the fact that it took me 30 years to find a person with whom there seemed to be the potential for such a deep and rich friendship, even if just for an instant. How much longer will it take to find somebody else like that? Let alone someone with whom that feeling of a genuinely unique connection would be mutual?
And is there any reason to assume that the answer to that question isn’t “longer than my remaining lifetime”?
I genuinely don’t know.
Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.