To Trust or Not To Trust, that's the Question

What follow are my thoughts on the question,

"When you break up, time and space can heal most things. However, why does it leave you feeling so bitter?"

This update is in email form (I wrote to a friend about this) and I have preserved most of the content as is, just removing any trace of who I was addressing. Read on...

One of my friends said this to me once during our third year at BITS. He was distraught after his girlfriend had broken up with him:

Wounds heal,
Scars go away,
Love Hurts...

But honestly, we know this before we fall in love/date/whatever. Problems arise when we break up maybe because we take ourselves too seriously and wonder why things went wrong. It happened, shit happens - to the best of us. You might deny this but it's in our nature to move on though - we eventually adapt and move on. The thing to note though is that we always over-estimate the emotional impact of our actions because we want to brace ourselves for the worst.

Why we choose to not trust again is a defence mechanism for self-preservation. No one likes to be hurt ergo, we shield ourselves to the point that we miss golden opportunities. The truth really is we are going to be hurt at some point or time in our life; that's what life brings - hurt and pain along with joy and happiness. It's all a give and take. But to let a relationship dictate all future ones is "your" biggest loss. This is a vagary of life, though the past shouldn't really influence the future, it does. And it's plain unfair to the new people who come in your life - the fact that your interactions with them are not purely based on their interactions with you but are based on your interactions with a phantom being that they can't recognize or fight. In the end, you gotta pick your battles. And really, you are mean, suspicious, etc to the new people you meet just because you wonder what the ulterior motives of the person are - when there might not actually be any.

A phase of introspection and motive-questioning is paramount but the faster you get out of it, the better off you are. Constant questioning isn't going to take you anywhere except down the road to Cynic-ville. Think of it like this - if you let your past relationship dictate what you do in the future, you have in effect handed victory to your old partner on a platter. Everyone wants to leave behind a train wreck, it's an ego boost to make a lasting impression. Solution: Take a chill pill and go with the flow and enjoy the ride with all it's ebbs and highs. At least you didn't watch the flow from the banks and wondered what it would be like to ride along.