You Can't Fall in Love in a Day, or Forgot Someone in Two

They say that “You can’t fall in love in a day, or forget someone in two”. But I forgot the saying immediately when I saw you for the first time. When our eyes met and I saw the first smile. When my heart began to beat faster and faster with each step you took towards me. It was then, only a few minutes after we met, that I fell in love with you.

I fell in love with every detail of your skin, of your scent, and what I imagined you would be like. I imagined you without knowing you, and in my imagination you were perfect. But this perfection was only in my mind. Reality is as cruel as it is wise, and it taught me that not everything that we imagine or dream will happen.

Now I know that only those who truly know each other can love each other. Everything else is just a fairytale. They are expectations that no one is required to fulfill. That’s why loving each other means knowing each other. And why forgetting is to leave a piece of yourself that you’ve shared and built with someone at your side.

Idealization of the other is toxic for love

These days, I don’t want to be the girl who forgets that idealizing your partner is like poison for love. It is a poison that clouds your reason and makes you see the other person as you imagine them to be. That made me see in him only what I wanted to see, not the reality. It didn’t matter what actually happened. But reality, sooner or later, always wins out.

Even though in most movies that I watch, the protagonists swear eternal love after one look, and in so many novels love happens in the blink of an eye, that doesn’t happen in real life. Or, it happens, but later the story continues and the spells are broken. Maybe it is more incredible than you can imagine, or it turns out to be nothing. The same nothing that can leave you gasping for air.

Falling in love is a process of getting to know each other. In order to be real, the process takes time. Not a little or a lot, but just the right amount. That is why I want to be that girl that doesn’t forget that reality is more complex than fiction and stories are just that: stories. These stories are easy to write when the ink is not your blood, and the doubts and hopes on the horizon aren’t yours.

And though my love story was more fiction than a reality, that doesn’t mean that  my pain was fiction too when  reality made me fall flat on my face. Feelings are never just a product of our imaginations. What I felt was real. So real that it hurt, even if it was based on a castle in the clouds.

Painlessly forgetting who you love is to not really know love at all.

As much as everyone tells me that the quickest way to get over one man is to get under another one, I can only answer that forgetting what you love without pain is to not really know love at all. Because love itself doesn’t hurt, or harm. It is the reality of trying to forget a failed love that really leaves a mark. 

What you lose when you see what is actually happening is the life you imagined with your fairytale prince who turned out to be a frog. You aren’t just the girl who forgets. You are the girl who rebuilds her future when what you wanted doesn’t work out; when you imagined something that you never had, but that you longed for.

Then you have to start again. From the beginning, but with more wisdom. You know that fairytales are stories of childhood. When you get older you stop seeing princes or frogs who complete you or hurt you. When you get older you don’t need anyone because you are unique. You value yourself, you love yourself, and you don’t miss anyone. No one else can complete you because you are already whole. You alone are worth it. Now you aren’t the girl who forgets or the girl who dreams of a fairytale life. You are the girl who loves herself.