After such a relationship, recovery is challenging

I went to the beach today, where I spent some time gazing at the water. I briefly lost myself in the motion and sound of the waves, temporarily putting my problems out of my mind.

I've been contemplating love a lot lately and wondering if it truly exists or is even worthwhile to pursue. Or whether living without the hope that a relationship may succeed is preferable.

Instead of learning the steps on our own, we can just be playing a silly game. Like a masquerade party where nothing is as it seems, romance can be a red herring that tricks us into believing one thing when it was truly another.

If you're like me, you may have learned that someone you believed loved you didn't actually feel that way. They vanished into the night like phantoms, as if the relationship didn't exist at all.

After such a relationship, recovery is challenging. We are left wondering about the nature of reality and whether our perception and experience of other individuals are flawed.

The truth is that this occurs more frequently than it ought to. People pretend to be in love when they are actually strangers, play at love instead of cultivating it, and seize and then dump you before the clock strikes midnight.

Their fantasy never ends. To fill the void in their life, they must pretend to be in love. They depend on you to provide them with something they lack internally.

This causes people to become linked to you, and this attachment may initially appear to be love. But if you stop giving them the void-filling affection they require, they will walk away without even turning around.

Knowing that it wasn't love—or even close to it—is the toughest truth to accept. When things go tough, real love doesn't run away, it doesn't escape when things are difficult, and it gives people the benefit of the doubt when something needs to be resolved.

You can tell it wasn't genuine love by this. You were placed in the role because you were a good fit, but it was only a fantasy in which you got to participate. Before you missed your cue or lost your line, you briefly held the position of leadership in their lives.

You get to play the lead role in the most fanciful love stories if their life is a stage. You may have had the time of your life, but who doesn't enjoy living in a dream world where dating is like visiting an amusement park, and every new person is a ride you can enjoy for a while before leaving them behind?

They weren't your ideal partner because they genuinely possessed those qualities, but rather because they imitated them and pretended to be who you wanted them to be. They served as the front for gaining your love before discarding it once they had you.

In fact, you might not even get along with them if you met them in person. Even yet, they might not be the sort of person you would get along with.

Therefore, you might wonder as you lay in bed at night why they ruined your relationship and treated everything as if it were insignificant. Another night of insomnia can even cause you to obsess over all the things you regret doing and all the ways you could have shown them more affection.

You believe they would have stayed if you could have simply made them feel your love or forced them to see.

But if they had loved you, they would never have stayed. The harsh reality that you must accept is that the affection they felt for you was not genuine.

You have to deal with that every day, which makes me feel horrible for you. Even those pleasant recollections must be considered in order to realize that the relationship wasn't really about love.

You have to accept that reality wholeheartedly. Once you do, you'll begin to advance. Like a wave receding from the coast, the pain will start to leave your body, and eventually you'll start to feel like yourself again.

But because it's difficult to recover from love, it will take time. It doesn't matter that this wasn't true love because it was true for you. At the end of the day, you might feel proud of yourself for having authentic feelings.