Dear girlfriend,
1 Corinthians 13: 3-13
If I give away all that I have, and I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends; as for prophecy, it will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease, as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of all is love.
Over the past seven months you have gotten to know the real me. I have never been fake, and I was always me, however, you don’t know everything that is me. I have a problem, not just one of course, but this one sticks out the most and has caused the most problems in my life. That problem is my need to make others happy, especially the ones I love. I put their happiness always before my own, and while that sounds good, it isn’t. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever tried to overcome, but I never can do it. This problem has caused many issues in school when I was younger, and in sports, and in everything I do. And right now, it is effecting me more than ever… I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. I told you the other day that I felt uncomfortable, and that I was always feeling nervous and alone, and that I had the Red Hots. I still have that feeling and I don’t know what all of it is, but I know what part of it is.
I NEED to make everyone happy. When I can’t do it, I don’t know what to do anymore. But I am not saying that I don’t think I can make you happy. I know I can make you happy. I know I do make you happy. I know I make you feel loved. But sometimes, it is with disregard for my own happiness. I will suffer if I know it will make you happy. To me it seems, ironically, to be the best source of my happiness. Do whatever it takes to make you happy, who cares about my own, I will find it in your smile. That is what I have always thought. It is my mind that tells me that I need to try to make everyone happy, and not my heart. My heart is my subconscious, I can’t control it if I wanted to, and it seeks happiness on its own. But even “if I give away all that I have, and I deliver my body to be burned, but have not happiness, I gain nothing.”
This past month, my mind has been stronger than my heart. I beat down my heart and hid the heartache that I have felt in order to keep you happy. PLEASE DON’T GET ME WRONG. I AM happy when you are happy, so it has been worth it. But that happiness is shallow. It only lasts while your happy, and I can’t always be there. It takes trust to have deep happiness, and we don’t have that in each other right now and so my heart acts on its own. I talk to my friends all night, because I feel you won’t understand if I told you. I comment back and forth with people on myspace, but not you and I don’t know why. I spend more time around my friends instead of you, I don’t know why. It isn’t fair to you. And it isn’t fair to me. Something has gone missing and I stumble blindly trying to fill it, and at the same time stumble further away from you.
Here is my heartache. I want to make you happy to make me happy. I don’t want to make myself happy. And here is the worst part. I can control my own happiness, but I choose never to try. I can’t control yours, and I always try. So I am always miserable. It’s like you thinking I would be happy about some of the gifts you gave me. Instead I got upset. Well it is like that everyday for me. Normally I could probably succeed in making you happy, but I can’t give you the things you need right now. I can’t come down very much anymore. I haven’t been able to talk on the phone. Sometimes I don’t even want to, because I am too scared to hear your voice because I will hear your disappointment. I see you forcing yourself to love me, and telling yourself that love should be hard, and you will do whatever it takes, but your lying to yourself. Maybe you love me, but you only love me because it’s what you see. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” Years ago, love to both of us was simply holding hands. Then it was a kiss. Then making out with tongue. And then love was waking up thinking about somebody and actually caring about what happened to them. And now love is this. But we are still children. We are reasoning like children. Someday we will both become adults and we will both grow in love and find an even stronger definition.
I’ll admit that I too believe that love is what you make it, so it is real for both of us. Like the example I have said about in terms of heart ache, the pain would be no different between children losing love and married people breaking up. So you DO love me, and I love you, but our definition isn’t working. We are going to end up hating each other, and that is the last thing I want. I can hardly ever call you, and when I do, we don’t say anything. I can hardly ever see you, and when I do, we think we are mad at each other. Making you happy made me happy. Then I realized I needed to make myself happy. But whenever I tried, you would not seem to tolerate it. Whether it be writing until late and postponing a call, or playing poker with some friends until late, or helping out my Grandma with her Christmas decorations, I felt you did not understand that these things made me happy, and I needed that happiness because I wasn’t around you. But instead I thought you were mad, so it so it no longer became about making myself happy, but worrying about your happiness once more, because I feared it made you angry. “Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful” toward me needed to do things that I enjoyed.
We both stress out way too much. Let’s face it. Your going away to Boulder. You are going to be even further, and even busier. I won’t be able to drive that far. I would love to, but I just can’t. I am wearing down a car that I need to last me for several years. I will go away. At some point. I didn’t want to tell you unless I ever knew for sure, and I still don’t know for sure, but Luke, Parker and I all got accepted into the California Musician’s Institute in Hollywood, California. We were considering moving there in a year.
You could be with someone that could give you everything I can and more. I know you don’t want anyone else, but let’s be real. Just for a minute. This isn’t right. At least right now. “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.” You get jealous when I am with other people, and I get jealous of Peter and other people. We are often arrogant and boastful because we try to be a better lover than the other. We make excuses. And sometimes we are rude to each other, and hang up in the middle of someone saying something that truly bothered them. I love you and you may hate me now, but if that is what it will take for you to do what’s best for you, and for me to finally do something for me, then I guess I will have to suffer through that. This IS NOT easy for me, so don’t ever think that.
If we lived different lives, I would not be writing this. But we don’t. And Luke has seen it, Parker has seen it, and my parents have seen it. And they all agree that as perfect as this all was, it needs to end, otherwise we will never really be as happy as maybe we one day could. Maybe after school is over it will be different, but we aren’t going to last that long at this pace. We are always at each other’s throats trying to make the other person feel bad about every little thing. We don’t trust each other. The only thing keeping this relationship together is blind love. But it’s not enough. It’s only enough to make my heart filled with pain while I write this, and not enough for me to stay in this forever. For this to last forever, we need trust. Faithfulness. Reliance. Friendship. The things the bible talks about. The kind of love we have in God. We need to always be right there when the other person needs us, even if we don’t realize we are there. Even if we aren’t there, we need to understand what each other needs to be happy. We don’t understand each other and we can’t do it right now. This isn’t a break. I don’t believe in them and they are bullshit. This is, we need to grow up before we try to retackle a relationship that requires more than we understand.. We are too young, and this is a mess of complication in our already over-flowingly complicated lives.
You may hate me, and may never forgive me. Maybe you will egg my car. Maybe you will talk me down to your friends and family and you will see other guys and tell them how horrible the man your ex was, and you will lie to yourself and them and tell them you never loved me. But that is how this goes most of the time, and I will have to get over it and that is why I want to die right now, but I am doing this because sometimes to achieve a higher happiness than just satisfied, you have to come out of a lower low. Sometimes to jump forward, you have to go back to get a running start. We are stuck. If I have to be miserable now and make you miserable now with a possibility that we will both be happier later, then I will do it. Maybe after school we can try again, but maybe you will move on. Maybe so will I, I don’t know but I can’t keep doing this.
You may think this is happening so suddenly? It only seems that way, and this also kills me. You will think that I don’t love you. You think that I lied to you every time I said it. You are very wrong. And I will be judged wrongly by everyone else. Your friends will try to convince you I never loved you and that I didn’t deserve you, but don’t listen to them. Love is worth it, don’t give up and never love again. It may make you feel better, hating me. It’s what I did to Heather. If you hate me, how can it hurt when I’m gone? But it only makes the hurt worse. I am not a liar. I love you still, but I realized more and more each day that it wasn’t going to be enough, but how do I tell you that? When you tell me you love me, I can’t say “I love you too, but I don’t know how much that will help us” You would break up with me, and I didn’t want that, I love you and wanted to be with you. So I just left it at I love you too. But then I am just leading you on. So to you this seemed like such a change so abruptly, but I have been struggling with it and crying every night over it for a month. I can’t keep crying. I am crying now. And I will cry harder than I ever have in my life for the next few days, but maybe that will help it stop.
I love you, and I hope you will find it in your heart to see that this needed to happen. I don’t know why we can’t be adults and just come to the agreement that sometimes the best thing is to go separate ways, but we do. People marry instead and struggle and fight and give guilt trips and just drag it on. That is why so many children have to watch their parents go through divorce. I hope you don’t decide to erase me from your life, because I care about you more than anyone alive and this truly was the biggest step for me in my life. You helped me see what love can be, and what I can look forward to when I am done with all the other parts of life that will be its foundation. Maybe it will be with you again, that I love with all my heart again. But we will only know with patience and time. Just please don’t stop loving me. That’s all I ask.
With all my heart,
Chris
