They Will Never Realize What They Lost

We all have someone from our past who we wish we hadn’t lost. Someone whose life events seemed to guide them in a direction away from us. Leaving us sad, lonely, and heartbroken. We’ve all experienced that wretched pang of despair when we say to ourselves: “One day they will realize what they’ve lost, and they’ll come back.” Or have said: “I hope that you find your way back,” or “one day you will see that I am the one for you.” The pain of letting someone go whom you don’t want to can not be described in words. There is no amount of beautiful verbiage that could illustrate the un-subsiding waves of sadness and desolation that will cripple you in times of misery. Whether it was something in their lives that pulled them away, like a career move or a bad decision, we all have someone we always thought would see the error of their ways and come back to right their wrongs.

There was once a woman I adored, everything I thought I ever wanted in a partner. She was smart, driven, honest, caring, and even loyal despite never having committed to each other. We spent a great deal of time getting close and learning the intricacies of one another’s personalities. Spending hours on the phone whether in calls or through messages. I was astonished, smitten even. The only problem was that she couldn’t see herself with me in any long-term capacity. She would tell me of the ways she loved me and how much I had come to mean to her, but there was always something that held us back. She wasn’t ready, didn’t want that, or wasn’t there yet. That was fine with me, I just enjoyed who she was, everything else seemed irrelevant at the time. As the situation progressed, I could sense the inner urge that I would have to let go, somewhere deep inside myself I longed for her. Maybe it was because we never had the chance to let it blossom in the ways it very well could have. Maybe I felt it was the right person wrong time. But let’s be honest, there is no such thing as the right person at the wrong time, just wrong people. Now this wasn’t a negative situation by any means, and even at its end was mutual and empathetic. She understood why I had to let go and I understood why she couldn’t stay. I would tell her that I hoped she found her way back to me. I told her to go live her life, do whatever she had to do, just come back to find me when she was ready. The fact that there was never any wrong -doing helped to foster the illusion of a future being reunited. There was no bad blood, nobody was ever betrayed; it was just that the situation as it was wouldn’t allow us to continue as we had been. We said our goodbyes and I hoped one day to see her again.

Maybe this was my way of holding onto something I wasn’t ready to let go of. I knew the situation wouldn’t work out and I could feel it drawing to a close, yet I kept telling myself that one day she will want what we had and return. The truth is that she won’t, and neither will yours. It’s a sad reality that we hold onto experiences like this and try to convince ourselves of some future event that will end in us getting exactly what we want. She will never come back to me saying, “I love you so much and now I am ready.” The person in your life that you have longed for will never see their way back to you or make amends. This could be our way of softening the emotional blow, giving someone all we had, just to be the ones left feeling broken and empty. Maybe it’s a psychological phenomenon to ease our pain and heartbreak of a love lost too soon. I believe, instinctively, that we all know they won’t return, but we long to reunite so that we don’t feel too lost, too broken, or too despondent. To give ourselves some semblance of hope that we didn’t just waste all our time and emotion on an arbitrary relationship.

The truth is, the reason they won’t be back is quite simple. Human beings tend to live extraordinarily complicated lives. In those lives, we come to many crossroads and we must make decisions. Sometimes we have to choose between two people, sometimes it’s a career move, other times it’s for our own protection. The issue here is that when we are forced to make a tough decision, we need reassurance that we made the right one. We need to know that what we chose was the best path. Sometimes we end up regretting our choices, but more often than not we reinforce ourselves through our own self talk. They will never return to us simply because they made their decision and they need to convince themselves that this was the right path. This is a human characteristic and they should not be faulted for this.

All of us, as human beings, need to know that we have done the right thing. Whether it be strictly for ourselves or for our families. Shit, I'll let someone go if they don’t like my dog. The truth is that we feel the way we feel for a reason. We choose based on what we feel is right for us at the time. Every one of us is only trying to do right by ourselves, we want to know that we made good decisions, we need to feel that we did the right thing. This is called the Choice-Supportive Bias. Essentially, when a person decides something, they will attribute positive characteristics to the option they chose, while ascribing negative traits to the one they didn’t. This is a cognitive bias naturally designed to reinforce ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel like the decision we made at any given time is the best one we could have made, it’s only human. This is, however, a message to the other side, to the people who hold on, longing for another’s return. Holding onto the hopes that one day this person will realize the error of their ways and return to make amends. It simply isn’t going to happen. Now don’t get me wrong, there are exceptions to every rule. I would imagine that all of us at one point or another regret or wish we had made a different decision. This does happen, however, it’s not only unlikely, it creates emotions, hopes, and expectations to be broken in the future. Understanding this bias will hopefully allow us all to learn to let go and attend to ourselves and our own path to healing. We will all naturally reinforce the decisions that we made. The woman I spoke of earlier will never make her way back to me, just as the one you hold onto isn’t likely to come admit they made a mistake to you. All we can do is move forward and focus on ourselves. To let go and heal.