I'm Done with Love! by Anonymous

How can anyone get to that point?

Good question. Well, since I don’t know the thought pattern of men, I won’t comment on them. However, I will talk about how I have gotten to that point. Reaching the point of being absolutely done with the idea of love…through with it once and for all.

It occurs to me that many men (and even some women) have no understanding of how a woman can reach the conclusion that love is not a part of her life. It’s easy….all it takes is enough rejection and enough disappointment. There’s a scripture in the word of God that says “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” When your hope has been deferred (for an extended period of time I might add) it’s easy to give up on hope all together.

After years of wanting love and never getting it, years of wanting to understand men and never getting a chance to (so to speak), and years of feeling like for the simple fact that you don’t look like, act like, or think like most women (from a societal view); that you are not allowed to be a candidate to receive love, not even by the standards of the body of Christ. Considering all of this it’s easy to give up hope.

Bishop T.D. Jakes did a lesson years ago on “Breaking the Spirit of Failure.” One of the things he mentioned was that after a while, failure can be a relief. After a while of hoping for something, it almost becomes easier to just accept that it will never happen than to allow yourself the luxury of hoping for it to happen and then being hurt yet again.

When I was 27 years old, I became friends with a man that I that began truly caring about. After two years he didn’t make the move to begin dating me like I thought he would and I was done. Done all together! I mean, as far as I was concerned that part of my life was dead, not to be resurrected or revived ever again. I looked at it from a very logical standpoint. Men had never seemed like they were genuinely interested in me, and I never bought into the cat and mouse roles that society says that men and women should play. I never wanted to join cat and mouse approach (it just kinda seems like a lot of faking; not to mention I resent the fact that I have to be “unavailable” or “coy” in order to peek a man’s interest). What does that mean? My real personality isn’t intriguing or interesting enough so I have to pretend? How incredibly degrading! Truthfully, it took a lot for me to like someone at all so I’d prefer not to add layers of games.

A man could be attractive, but I was never affected in the least until he began looking at me. As I got older, I began wanting to know that he not only had integrity, but that I could actually be my unconditional self with him. Ironically, as I got older, I found my ability to be transparent less and less possible with men. It went from 50% chance as a teenager to about 25% in my early twenties. By the time I was 23 or 24 it was 15% and then by the time I was 26, when I had the encounter with this man, it was .000000005%....or at least that’s how it felt.

All my life I had heard that I wasn’t “good enough” for any man to want me; either because I was too fat, too skinny, my hair was too nappy, or too thick, or I was too shy, or too outgoing, or too outspoken or not outspoken enough. By the time I was in my late twenties, I was extremely angry about all the mistreatment that I endured as a child being picked on by my peers and even my family, so at that time I gained the label “too angry.” I was always “too” something; and I was tired of it.

So I made a decision, a tearful one; to accept the idea that I would be alone the rest of my life. I believed love would never be a part of my life…..PERIOD. It’s not that I didn’t want love because I did. It was just I never believed that I would ever experience it. The reward seemed way too low for me to invest any of my energy into it. Interestingly enough, I got to the point where I couldn’t even hurt anymore….I was numb. I would never talk about it because I didn’t want anyone to try to “talk me out of it” or tell me that I just had a severe case of not knowing my own worth. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter how much I thought I was worth, it was impossible for any man to find anything in me valuable enough to want to marry. It’s not like I didn’t have value but believe men weren’t able to recognize or value it. I thought men only valued a woman who was skinny with long hair. Even if she wasn’t skinny with long hair, she was at the very least extremely willing to play the cat and mouse game. The game that lets the man hunt her like an animal so that she can be placed upon his mantle piece like a trophy and not a human being.

Since it made no sense to me to even consider, I would look away when men noticed me and I still do, it’s instinctive now, I don’t even think about it. If a man that I’m attracted to begins to behave like he likes me, I automatically become defensive and think he must be trying to play a joke on me. The thought of this makes me mad and offended since I refuse to be made a fool out of. When a man who I’m not attracted to approaches me or notices me, my thought is usually “it figures.”

Truthfully speaking, if you haven’t already figured out, this is still something that I struggle with. Usually, people don’t understand. They just say things like “you don’t love yourself” or “you don’t know your own worth and value.” I always want to say, “What does that have to with anything?” Just because I think I’m beautiful, smart, thoughtful and have a lot to offer doesn’t automatically mean that everyone will agree with me; especially, men who seem to have been brain-washed by our culture. People say “so what if a man can’t see your value, you don’t need a man!” Then my reply is “you’re right, so why even be open to the possibility?” It seems like a lose-lose battle. So why would I bother? Or for that matter, why even be friends with a man if there’s even a hint that maybe I could possibly develop feelings for him in the future? Why would I set myself up to be hurt that way?

Another thing I’ve realized is that a guy doesn’t have to be a jerk in order to hurt me, all I have to do is care enough about him and that’s all the required ammunition. Couple this with the sense that I should have known better than to think any man on this earth would ever want to be with me since they just don’t feel that I’m good enough; it’s just way too much stress to bear.

Ironically, in the midst of all this, God keeps saying I’m supposed to be married, and as much as I’ve begged him to remove the desire all together, but He simply will not. I still don’t fully understand, if He knew I was supposed to be married all this time, why would He allow me to be rejected so many times? Why would He allow me to grow up as part of a culture that says if a woman isn’t perfect, then she is not worth the trouble (I’ve heard that, not just in mainstream, even in the church.). Not to mention, I’ve watched my mother get called everything but a child of God by the man who supposedly loved her and the one she loved. Not to mention seeing so many other women love men hard and be taken advantage of. Why didn’t God prevent those things? I guess I’ll never know.

I do know this one thing…I’m tired of being tormented by fear!

Anonymous

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