When You Get Dumped

It's been a week since my breakup. The guy I thought I was going to marry decided he didn't want to marry me. Kinda funny how I went from talking about a rejected wedding proposal as an analogy (on my first blog post) to talking about a literal rejected wedding proposal (right now). More or less. There was no proposal, but there could've been.

And if you've ever been in a relationship yourself, then you know how terrifying the what ifs are.

I'm always writing fiction, and it's moments like these when I feel like my life has turned into a novel. There's conflict, but there's this suffocating feeling because I'm not the author; I can't decide what happens and I don't have any control over it. I know as a character I have to try to find the resolution but I don't know how.

It's scary.

Don't get me wrong. It's awesome to have more material from more heartbreak, but in the beginning, you get in a funk. At least I do.

I think my funk is ending. There's a reason I waited a week before writing this. If I wrote this immediately afterwards, I wouldn't even be writing. I'd be ranting with my emotions, crying, and then regretting publishing it afterwards. It's great to cry it out and rant, don't get me wrong. I purposefully surrounded myself with friends for the first weekend simply to avoid being alone in my own thoughts. And it worked. Sorta. But there's no better feeling than going over everything again and knowing you did all you could, and regardless of how it ended, you're now not wasting your time on someone who doesn't deserve you.

I write a lot of chicklit, and usually my protagonist has an epiphany about her life. And I think that's what's happened to me. Yeah, my ex and I had good memories, but they weren't even that great. My ex himself came out and said he had no romantic feelings for me at all.

The epiphany: he was with me to avoid his heartbreak from his ex (it was my second time being the rebound, how impressive! I gotta keep that record doing haha), and I was with him so I could say I was with him.

Yup. That's me. Maybe it's the romantic in me, I don't know. But I've wanted to be in a long-term relationship for forever. I want someone to love me. I want it too much. Writing is my biggest goal, and then a relationship is my second. And that's totally healthy; the part that's unhealthy is the fact I keep forcing everything and trying to control and check off every event in my life like it's a mandatory bucket list.

So I think my resolution is to stop dating for now. I'm not saying the story of my life is one of the cliché romances where a guy will bump into me in the cafeteria and fall in love with me the second he sees me. No. He won't be the bad boy next-door. No, not at all (I sincerely hope not).

I avoid clichés. I don't know what's going to happen. I think that's what makes the best kind of book. Finding amazing relationships is hard. Yeah, there's a lot of people, but finding the right ones is just as hard as participating in a fishing contest and being told you have to find one specific type of fish.

I'm still going to write, but just because I'm a romance writer doesn't mean I need to have the dream love life.

To put it in perspective, old me definitely would've applied to "Too Hot to Handle" if I was guaranteed a husband, but the new me knows how to resist the short term temptation for long-term happiness.

It's something called delayed gratification.