I’m just trying to break your heart </3

I remember reading a friend’s blog ages ago that served to question the art of “friendshipping vs. relationshipping” (what, actually, is with all the shipping?) and this has kind of become the impetus for one of my  own. He pretty much was the reason that I HAVE this blog, although I’m sure that he didn’t forsee himself as the inspiration for quite so many posts in quite this manner. Although, then again, maybe he did.

How can you define the difference between friends and lovers? I hate that when you look at that sort of question you leave it, you dismiss it as indefinable. I hate that because why can’t you define something so fundamental? I hate that because right now it’s all that I need to know.

Friendship is such a variable condition. I think that I tend to be such an insular person that maintaining a friendship is difficult. Throughout school I floated through so many groups, I found it so hard to find a stable collection of friends. I couldn’t even seem to find myself in the mess of adolescence. Now, a year after graduation I find myself home in Newcastle with only a handful of people that I’ve kept in touch with. I love them all, but I find myself questioning how I’ve reached such a conclusion. I feel like I’ve been stripped of everyone but those people that were once my very best friends, but at the same time I feel like they are drifting away from me as well.

My best friend for three years started as yet another unrequited crush. I feel like my whole life is just another unrequited crush. I feel like I’m not meant to be loved. He helped me get through high school to some degree, because it gave me someone to have that no one else really did. I didn’t see him much outside of school, and I don’t think I shared that much with him, but that was really the best part. After the intensity of being thrown together for a whole week of school, I needed the time to be alone without feeling like I was abandoning the friendship. The thing with this is that right now I can’t even stand him. We had no fight, we had no disagreement, we didn’t even have a reason to dispose of each other. How can you have so much affection for someone and then just lose it? He was a friendship, and I think that the difference is partly based on the idea that friendships just tend to be fickle.

How can you honestly be such friends with someone, and yet find yourself completely despising him just a year later? I think that my problem with friendships is that I am not in the practice of exposing myself within them. I think that relationships have to be friendships first, obviously, but I feel like the difference is that you have to want to be completely open. I tend to tell lots of people lots of different things, and expose myself in parts, but, almost inexplicably, I want to expose myself wholly to someone I not only love but that I also at least feel that I could be in love with. Friendship can only go so far, it is the willingness to be seen naked, both figuratively and literally, that pushes it into something else, something much more intense, but also much more rewarding.

Obviously, this whole condition must rely on the mutual acknowledgement of this desire before it can develop itself into something more. All I ever wanted, and all I still want, is for someone to absolutely know my, or to want to absolutely know me and to hold me. I finally understand how desperate you can feel to be close to someone because you want to so bad that you need to have them, and to be consumed by them. A physical relationship is quite obviously a large part of a truly magnificent relationship, but it’s a secondary reaction to the intial response.

I spent my first year of university life single, and I decided offhandedly to cheat my way into intimacy. I fell into these two incidents because I wanted to be exposed to what I saw as a more grown up lifestyle. I wanted to assert my independence, but found myself left feeling empty, and I wasn’t sure that I’d want to bother trying again. I did, however, in the throes of what I assumed to be love, and found that before I was missing such a crucial element. I was missing the relationship. I don’t want to sound like I regret the steps that I took, because how can you regret your past, but I did discover a way to know myself better.

Love, love, love is the extension of friendship that makes you seek nothing but closeness, and nothing but more. Can you take it back? Can you take back the fact that you were naked in their presence? Can you resume a friendship even though there wasn’t one initially? How are you supposed to deal with such a ridiculous fall out? When there is no animosity, when there is no desire to be left behind but you find that you really have been, what are you supposed to do? You can’t just go into hate, there’s much too much already at stake.

By my definition, your lover is your best friend, but where do these feelings go when you just stop? How can I be able to lose my love and just be friends? I miss having someone to talk to about everything, and to tell everything to, so I’m maintaining a friendship even though he’s “just not attracted to me”, even though he “just needs some space”, even though I feel like such a transition is cheating me out of something. How can I lose both my boyfriend and the person I expose myself to? I don’t understand how to continue, so I’m just trying. I don’t know what it’s going to be like a few weeks from now, so I’m just trying. I don’t know how to deal with the fact that he didn’t steal my money to buy drugs, and didn’t make it an easy situation, so I’m just trying.

I’m just so confused.

But I’m just trying.