It wasn't until I realized that loving somebody wasn't going to solve all of my problems that I started to fear commitment. For the first part of my early twenties (if you can even assign 'parts' to the early twenties, but for the sake of this we'll just say this was my years 18-23) I thought I'd always be a hopeless romantic, a constant victim of unrequited love, bouncing back and forth between two types of women: those who want something from me, and those who just don't want to be alone. Countless failed and awful relationships taught me one thing, I thought: I'll always be the victim of unrequited love, even within a relationship.

I never understood guys who were afraid of commitment; the ones that pretty girls cry about, the ones that leave behind beautiful women. I always thought: how could you not just want to hold onto someone, no matter what?

But now I've got the fear in me, too.

It wasn't a broken heart that taught me that I shouldn't love someone. It wasn't selfish women stringing me along for their own purposes that made me unable to trust. It wasn't even being cheated on that made me embittered and sad. In truth, I never learned any of those things, no matter how many times the world tried to teach them to me.

It wasn't until I stopped expecting that adding someone else into my life would fix all of my problems that I started to fear commitment. It makes sense, really: it was the constant feeling of need to have someone in my life that motivated me to want to be with someone so badly. Now that I no longer feel that I need to have someone in my life, I've suddenly realized that I no longer have to settle or work around someone else's undesirable characteristics.

My ex, as we were breaking up with the the second time, kept saying that relationships are work, relationships are work, relationships are work, and you have to be willing to work for them. In the context of what we were having issues with, she meant that relationships are about working past the things that annoy you about your lover. "Work" is actually just willfully ignoring or letting go of the things that bug you. I found myself in a position where I didn't feel like I wanted to work, not in the way, that a good relationship not necessarily shouldn't be work, but at least shouldn't feel like work, and it always felt like work to me.

I don't know what love is, now, simply because I've lost all touch with what I used to think love felt like. Love was that dangerous feeling, where I felt like logic and control are slipping away from me and being absorbed by a constant feeling of need and desire. I can't even feel this way anymore, so I feel detached entirely from emotion. Not all emotion, but what I've always thought emotion was, like a fish that's jumped from one bowl into an entirely new and unfamiliar bowl and is consequently shitting his fishy pants and crying that the world he knew turned and left him there merely because he didn't even realize he switched bowls.

Now it's dawning on me that I've switched bowls, and the anxiety of no longer "knowing what love is" is waning and It's finally dawning on me that I've got to figure out what is going to make me feel like I'm in love. I'm still coming from the angle of "what need can a relationship fulfill in my life?" but now instead of answering that question with things like "direction, ambition, a reason to wake up in the morning" I can think clearly of things an ideal woman would bring to my life, like "companionship, warmth, understanding, hot sexiness, cool headedness".

It's scary, but it's also exciting. I feel lost a lot of the time, like I'm being swallowed by all the indecision that my newfound clear-headedness brings me, but it's a lot better than feeling like I'm wallowing in nothing but self-pity and fear. I wonder how long it'll be before I feel love again, and of course, melodramatically, I wonder if I will ever find it again... But until then, I'm going to be happy.

Your lesson for the day: A relationship isn't going to solve your problems. If you think it is, then you're going to have a lot of trouble in life.

Song Note: The Magnolia soundtrack doesn't seem to be up for download on Amazon MP3 and I don't talk about Magnolia here, so instead I link to a Harry Nilsson tribute album I've never listened to before.