love out loud: losing hope ain’t easy
Way back when, I told a friend on a play date that there was no Santa Claus. I’d always been pretty resilient to news like this and was surprised by the hysteria that followed. Crying, yelling, the whole shebang, and right before my parents came to pick up their problem child, my friend’s dad told me I’d ruined all her hope.
For some reason, this sentence is one of the most poignant memories of my childhood, and it’s taken me more than 15 years to understand what he actually (probably) meant.
As Adelaide’s summer was coming to an end last year, I left my number on the table of a restaurant for the waiter who had served my friends and me, and started seeing him soon afterwards.
A week into ‘it’, I saw a photo of my ex with his ex and realised I wasn’t over my last relationship. Two dates later, I ended things with the waiter.
He thanked me for being honest with him about the reason for it, but also said that not being over my ex was something I should’ve shared with him on our second date. Given that we’d only had four in total, I thought he was being a touch melodramatic. But the issue wasn’t that I’d wasted two weeks of his time, it was that our brief relationship was already on some kind of trajectory in his mind (much like it had been in mine prior to discovering the photo), and it was this hope that I’d ruined.
This is what we really take from people when we do wrong by them in the early stages of a relationship. Too much behaviour is absolved when the parameters are yet to be defined in some way that is compatible with a facebook status and we forget that ‘some person I’m seeing’ is no less a human being than someone we’ve been with for years, and that they should usually be afforded the same amount of respect. Not love or trust, but respect.
Anyone who is seeking some kind of connection with a person is, at some point and to some degree, going to imagine a future with them. I’m not talking about the kind of nonsense that women are ridiculed in the media for thinking about as soon as they meet someone, but that thought of ‘is this a person for whom, further down the track, I’ll be happy to forego getting drunk in order to spend time with them?’ And if that person hurts you, even if it’s before they’ve met your parents or before your housemate starts complaining that they’re constantly lurking around your place like a feline, it’s going to feel less like they’ve just used up some of your time and more like they’ve rejected the mold in your bed that you imagined you might eventually be okay with them creating.
Then again, maybe the turn of events that prompted the writing of this article happened because I told my friends that there’s no Santa Claus.
Karma’s a bitch.
