Staying Where You Don’t Belong

One of the strongest feelings I had in my last relationship was uncertainty.

I remember scrolling through Google for hours, with the search engine spitting out nearly identical articles reading “Signs You Love Him More Than He Loves You” and “10 Signs He Is Losing Interest.” As I scrolled through these articles, I thought to myself: see, none of these reasons ring true for me. I mean… only a few of them do. I would click on another, desperately searching for an answer to how I felt inside. The truth was, I could look at articles from corny Kickstarter websites all day, but I was still refusing to acknowledge my intuition. He wasn’t right for me. The fact that I had to turn to Google is an answer in itself. 

So, why stay where I don’t belong? It’s a fact of life that we will grow out of people and places. But I had trouble accept that, and I was clinging to what I thought was love. I allowed the good to outshine the bad, telling myself that he was just going through a rough time. I didn’t have boundaries. I couldn’t recognize that I was being drained by someone who barely even thought about filling me up.

I’ve noticed that myself and many other women struggle with our boundaries when it comes to romantic relationships, especially with men. There are many facets to this problem, so I’m going to try to explain my experiences as best as I can. 

 

We value romantic love over all other types of love.

There’s no doubt our culture overvalues romantic love. We are fed ideas of finding the “one” or “soulmate” from novels, TV shows, movies, art, poetry, advertisements, and the list goes on. This media gives us a unified, pre-packaged, and often heteronormative version of romantic love, which we end up modeling our own romantic relationships after. Basically, this media we see almost every day of our lives shapes how we love, how we find love, and how we expect to be loved. It makes me wonder, would we even fall in love if it weren’t for these mediums telling us how to love, how to find the perfect person, and the best age to do it? Would we still freak out at being the only single friend in our 30s and beyond? Would we still stay in toxic relationships out of fear of being alone? Would we still feel like failures after every relationship that didn’t work out?

I question what our lives as women would look like if they weren’t centered around finding the “one.”

While many women have actually broken free of this cycle, it’s often met with sour looks and scrutiny. I saw this several times when I was watching Sex and the City. Although Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte were happily single, outsiders often questioned their happiness and assumed they were miserable for not being married or having children because, well, misogyny. Women are expected to want to settle down and have children because that’s how it’s always been, that’s their presumed role. And to be completely honest with you, my best friends have always felt more like my soulmates than any of the guys I’ve dated. They support my passions, they randomly check up on me, and they make me feel full.

 

Women are expected to heal men / “Ride or Die” culture. 

I’ve seen this idea pop up a lot lately, and it always rubs me the wrong way. I think that supporting your partner through tough times is important to any healthy relationship, but this burden is often so heavy it causes women to neglect our own mental health and lives.

A lot of men who depend on women to unpack and sort their problems actually need professional help from a licensed therapist. I encountered this problem in my last relationship, and I didn’t even realize it until I was out. I was constantly breaking my back to help my partner out because I loved him, but whenever I needed the same support — I rarely got it. I was always filling him up emotionally and worrying about him, but I never felt like he cared about my well-being. I never felt the same genuine love and care I gave him when he needed it most. Still, I didn’t feel like I could leave him because I wanted him to be okay, even though the relationship was draining me.

I was crying a lot. Every time I felt misunderstood or undervalued by him, I would cry. I wish I could look back and tell myself to snap out of it. None of my friends’ boyfriends made them feel this way. None of my friends would ever allow me to stay with him if they knew what was going on. Why was I so oblivious?

It’s so easy for me to spiral into anger at myself for staying somewhere I didn’t belong, but I learned something valuable from the experience that I wouldn’t have learned any other way: trust your intuition.

Despite what I’d been taught in the past, being in a romantic relationship does not mean you have it all. Most importantly, I learned that being single will always be better than being miserable with someone else. Whether we leave or stay with a person or place that isn’t meant for us, life will eventually push us in the direction we are meant to be in. There’s no point in beating ourselves up for staying where we don’t belong and not realizing it sooner.

The most important rule is to be compassionate with yourself and always, always take a lesson from every hardship, because most lessons cannot be learned in any other way besides through experience. Staying where we don’t fit teaches us how to recognize when future situations and people aren’t working. And that lesson that will take you far in life.

 

Photos (in order of appearance) by Lin Cheng-Sheng, Erika Bowes, Petra Collins, and Herbie Yamaguchi.