Dating : Seeing My Situationship as a Mirror Rescued Me from Hypocrisy

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. People are mirrors and when you are in a romantic relationship or situationship, you will see some things about yourself that you would never see in a friendship or family relationship.

I met someone late 2016 and instinctively knew that it wasn’t going to go anywhere. If I know your past and I know you’ve done nothing to investigate why your past was the way it was, you will be doomed to repeat it. I wanted no part of the collateral damage.

But in getting to know her, I started to believe that the risk of collateral damage was low. “She’s too giving and sensitive,” I thought.

She really was those things but people are complex. Give them a new context and you will see a new person.

I told her that I liked her and she gushed that she felt the same. I felt like we were mirrors of one another.

But a week and a half later she was ignoring me and talking to someone else and by the end of the week, she invited the new person to my house without my knowledge and when they left I didn’t hear from her for two weeks.

It was two weeks because I decided to message her. For all I know if I messaged her a year later, she would’ve never said a word in a year.

She said she needed an escape. “An escape from what?” I asked. She spoke about work, health and home stress. But that made no sense. Why would this other person be an escape? That’s what I should’ve asked.

The thing about me and this girl is that we really are mirrors but aside from the flippant and fun similarities, we mirrored the aspect of ourselves that kept us down the most.

For me, I believed the lies in my head. If it sounded good and it gave me what I wanted, I’d fall for it. It was embarrassing as someone who considered himself a skeptic. I walked away from religion. I didn’t like comforting lies, but perhaps that was my shadow.

Once I started to hate on those who lived comforting lies and never examined the things they believed in, I couldn’t see how I was guilty of the very thing I was condemning. Which of course made me stay in hopeless situations for far too long.

With her, she betrays herself too and believes the lies in her own mind. We had several conversations about how her mind was on overdrive. Her therapist and I both tried to encourage her to not believe the thoughts but to just let them be there. Trying to get rid of them would only make them that much louder and stronger.

But that wasn’t really the point. As much as I criticized her, she was my mirror. If she wasn’t being real with me, was I being real with her?

Nope.

There were a number of times when I needed to express how I felt and I never did, until I got fed up. When I got fed up, I got quiet and acted like everything was fine while in a tone of annoyance.

But from the beginning, I didn’t trust her. I knew my intuition wasn’t wrong because as much as I was still trying to figure out my issues with romance, I knew that an unchecked past meant that you’d keep suffering the same way with new people.

I painted myself the victim. So did she. She had a tendency to choose people who couldn’t love her. So did I.

Overall, you have two people who betrayed themselves, didn’t admit how they actually felt, betrayed each other and played victim. Sounds like a half-decent 90s sitcom to me.

The ability to use relationships as a mirror to reveal who you are is immense. The only problem is when you deny that you have the traits that the mirror is revealing to you.

It’s like some kind of mental dysmorphia. The mirror is showing you one thing, but because you told yourself you don’t have that mental pattern or belief, you never see it.

And yet, no matter how many mirrors you look at, no matter how many relationships you have, there they are. The same issues you claim to not have or the issues you refuse to acknowledge.

It took a long time for me to see that I was guilty of the same things she was doing. While they weren’t the same kind of selfish or the same kind of delusion or for the same kind of self-preservation, they were selfish, delusional and for self-preservation.

This post is a testament to me acknowledging my problem. It’s a testament to me admitting that the traits of self-betrayal for comforting lies were here but they didn’t serve me.

It’s a testament to the end of my judgment of her and, by extension, myself.