Better to Have Loved

Alfred Tennyson once said “'Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.”, we’ve all heard this, and I’ve always stood by it. Whenever someone that I have some form of profound connection with has walked out of my life or I’ve done the walking, I’ve never known myself to take any of it very well at all. I often go through every emotional reaction in the psychiatric handbook, however, one that I amazingly manage to skip, perhaps not at first, but later on down the road, is regret. I’ve had more social blunders than the amount of times Letterman makes a bad joke on a single run of his show, but despite the inconveniences and the pain those blunders have roused, there isn’t one thing I would change about what has happened in my past.

I won’t dance around it, with everything that has happened, I was left with a bitterness that made it difficult for me to recognise myself when I would look in the mirror; I was left with a rage that made me say and do things that, yes, on the topic of reactions, I do have deep, deep contrition for, and some nights, that rage and that bitter person do have a habit of stealing a few minutes away, but in the times that they don’t, it’s because I find an appreciation that is far greater in worth than the worth that any anger and remorse can collect. Sometimes I just think back and, bar the issues and all the bullshit, I appreciate the fact that I once had those friends, those good times, the jokes and, for the most part, the love. I may get mad and I may say horrible things, but never have I wanted to turn back the clock and eliminate an entire person from my memory simply on a bad ending – the way I see it is, the severity of your feelings following a friendship going belly-up is indicative of how much that connection meant to you, wanting to erase it based on that severity would be nothing but a great injustice to yourself on your own part.

I have a friend that loves a guy, and I don’t say that loosely, the only problem is that they are no longer together. She says that she wants to forget him; that she wishes that the whole thing never happened, in fact, she opposes the above quote, but I don’t share that emotion at all. I’ve pondered ‘what-if’s, but like that quote, I’d rather be heartbroken for years than to have been spared love; I’d rather love a girl that hardly notices me than not to feel love for her at all. Friendships, relationships – even the ugly ones had a beautiful period, and that period of bliss, joy, comfort, invigoration, infatuation and whatever other emotion you had felt, it’s out of love and that’s a gift, and I don’t see how anything would make somebody want to give that gift back.