Love Lessons – 1 - 4

Love hits you like a ton of bricks. Love is one of the most powerful emotions; it can make people do crazy, stupid and even wonderful things in its name. I happen to be a number one fan for love; I have it tattooed on my wrist, wearing my heart on my sleeve in a literal sense. The word alone gives me butterflies. There is this rumor that people only get a few great loves in their lives. And if you noticed, people don’t normally marry their 18^th boyfriend or stay together with their 13^th wife. People usually fall in love with one of the first few. So what if you’ve fallen in love and lost that love. Now what? Is it too late? Is it really better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?

I believe in learning a lesson from each love interest, and I don’t think that there is such a thing as great loves. I feel like there are soul mates and you only get one. The true question for many single people is how do you know if you’ve already met your soul mate. I can’t answer that question, but I know that I met mine. And I have had a few other interests, people that I actually cared for at one time or another. Maybe it sounds wrong, but the more people you’ve dated the better prepared you are to deal with your true love. And it only takes a few to set your standards. I don’t think people can grow up without heartbreak…so here are some of my past heartbreaks.

Part 3 of 4 – The Abuser

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Disclaimer: Eventually I will stop including these and feeling the need to justify my own actions. However, I came to terms a long time ago with my life, and my past. Although I am very young I have gone through different things in life. I like to think of myself as being someone who knows love. Inside and out. Even though my love is still growing and will change as I mature, I still believe that I know love. From my past, present and even future love, I think there are always things that can be learned from it. From every relationship there are lessons, sometimes they are very obvious, but other times, you have to look back at the situation to find the lesson, and whether you know it or not, you in fact learned from that experience.

What type of lesson can be learned from an abusive relationship? I was 16, dating someone who was 19 and we dated for 2 years. When we met, I already knew his name. For some reason the universe was giving me a sign, but at the time, I thought the universe wants me to meet this guy. How else would I know his name before he told me? At the time I thought he could have been my soulmate. However, when you’re young, naïve and in search of love, anything is possible. Whenever I think about the type of relationship that we had, it makes me so angry. Not angry at him, because I have forgiven him, but at myself for being so stupid.

Have you ever been in a relationship where you argued all the time? We fought every single day, about everything. There was not a day that went by that I wasn’t apologizing for something that I didn’t even do. I have never cried so much in my life, than I did while we were together. He used to grab my wrists, to control me, and he would shake me so hard to stop crying. But I couldn’t help it. To this day I can’t stand when someone touches or grabs at my wrist. He would make me walk three feet behind him, with my head down the whole time, so I wouldn’t “look” at anyone else. I lost contact with all my friends from high school, and my own mother wouldn’t talk to me the whole time I was dating him. He was one of the most controlling people that I ever met. I can’t even talk about the worse times we had together. But he was not only physically abusive, but he was also mentally and verbally abusive.

At a time when most people were having fun in high school, going to dances and parties with friends, I spent that time in one of the worse relationships in my life. I wasted so much energy during what was so supposed to be the best time of my life, on a relationship that drained me. I couldn’t focus in school because he wanted to stay up all night arguing with me. He bought us Nextel cell phones and Two Way pagers so he could always contact me. I didn’t even know the numbers on any of those. He would use the walkie talkie feature to talk to me to find out where I was at all times.

It wasn’t until my last year in high school that I started getting fed up. My mother bought me a car in my senior year, and let’s just says I became violent back with him. I’m an Aries, and we have a lot of fire in side of us. There was only so much that I could take. I started doing things with out him. Going to parties and dances with my friends, and since he was such a loser, he didn’t even have a car, I could leave and he wouldn’t be able to find me. He would stand me up all the time, later I learned that was his way of controlling me. If I would wait for him, then he knew that he had power over me. Once I had my car, I started standing him up and I became the one in control.

I learned so much from this relationship. When I finally broke up with him, he started stalking me. I not only had to change my number, but I had to move 20 miles away from everything I grew up around. I had to change all my email addresses and even four years after we broke up, he still contacted me.

I was so weak when I was with him, I was insecure. I have so much more confidence now. I have never cried over a guy since being with him and I will never cry because of a relationship or because of man. I promised myself that I can be a stronger person and that I wouldn’t have drama surround my life anymore. In my current relationship we have never argued, and its been 6 years. Even though I wish I didn’t have to go through all of the things I had to deal with, I am so glad that I did. That relationship taught me about the things that I will not take in a relationship. I was able to set standards for myself. And I went in to my next relationship open and honest. I let him know that I am all about myself and that I love myself more than I could love him, and that I had to take care of number one before I could take care of anyone else. I never took care of myself in my past relationships. I thought that if I made the other person happy, then everything would be fine.

And this is only part 3 of 4.