(((I reprinted this with permission..)))She ain't no expert

I am NOT an Expert
By Taylor Cast | Published: October 16, 2010
Mat­ters of the heart are never easy. Seriously.
I write about rela­tion­ship advice and I never claimed to be an expert, I stress this often.
I feel like a fraud.
Why?
Because despite the fact that I give good rela­tion­ship advice, and let’s face it I know I do, I can’t seem to make my own rela­tion­ships work. I real­ize that in saying/​writing this I am pos­si­bly dis­count­ing all the advice I’ve ever given. I’m okay with that. The advice I give is based entirely on my own expe­ri­ences and from the mis­takes I have made and learned from. You don’t get your heart bro­ken with­out learn­ing a few pointers.


So why do I feel like a fraud? Well in my own life the same dat­ing issues plague me. The dis­ap­pear­ing man; the comittment-​​phobe; the player, the nar­cis­sist, you name it, I’ve dated it. Recently I’ve been dat­ing some­one who I thought, and just may, defy all of those cat­e­gories. I’ve opted out of writ­ing about him because it is pre­cious to me. Also because I think in writ­ing about my cur­rent rela­tion­ships it opens up a door that I would rather keep shut, the door that allows oth­ers to offer input on my rela­tion­ship. This is some­thing I only want from my own close friends. Well recently I got my heart bro­ken. To be quite hon­est I was blind-​​sided. I knew that there were lim­i­ta­tions to our rela­tion­ship, cir­cum­stances I had accepted as tem­po­rary. Yet in spite of this real­ity I fell in love.
I know I am stat­ing the obvi­ous here but to define love is an exer­cise in futil­ity, you can­not define some­thing that you can only feel in your own heart and is an expe­ri­ence that is com­pletely dif­fer­ent for each per­son. I for one know that my sit­u­a­tion is chal­leng­ing to solve because of this silly emo­tion, love. I fell in love, I didn’t want to fall, I wasn’t look­ing to fall, and I was con­tent to keep my heart and san­ity intact. Yet here I am now in love with some­one and faced with the real­ity that this love may pos­si­bly be wasted. Why do we make it so hard on our­selves? We fall and then we entan­gle our­selves into another person’s heart and life. It is so much eas­ier to be self­ish and keep those feel­ings at bay. Why didn’t I just do that? Run away at the first sign of deep emo­tion. I could have escaped all these hurt feel­ings and rejec­tion. Why? Because the allure of love is so intox­i­cat­ing, it makes you feel as if lone­li­ness is just a word. Love makes us brave: it makes us hope­ful for the future. The scary part about that is when you fall you begin to make deci­sions in your life fac­tor­ing in the object of your love. I am at a point in my life where I am mak­ing big deci­sions about my future and I wasn’t scared to fac­tor in this per­son. I was excited to include them.

If any­one in my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion asked me for advice I would tell him or her to walk away. It is so sim­ple to give advice from an out­side per­spec­tive. To look at the sim­ple facts and offer a cut and dry solu­tion. When you are wrapped up in the mid­dle and feel­ings are involved it’s dif­fi­cult to see what the next move should be.
For the most part I believe things are black and white and when it comes to love and rela­tion­ships you’re in or out. I don’t know is not a suf­fi­cient answer. Back to my cur­rent grey sit­u­a­tion; my advice to myself would be to “say good­bye, move on and get over it. Sure you’ll be sad and you’ll ques­tion of you did the right thing a few hun­dred times but even­tu­ally it won’t hurt any­more and then you’ll truly move on. This sit­u­a­tion that you are in now will become a mem­ory. It will be a les­son learned and you’ll be the bet­ter for it.” But, me, now stand­ing here decid­ing what to do I can’t take my own advice. I tried to. I tried to be strong and walk away and main­tain some self-​​respect but that didn’t last. Because I have all these ter­ri­ble con­fused feel­ings and unan­swered ques­tions. They are swim­ming around in my head and mak­ing every­thing unclear. Some­one asked me today when I stopped think­ing with my head and started think­ing with my heart. I can say that it was the moment that the word love entered into my vocab­u­lary again. Love. What the #&$^ is love? I’ve only been in love once before now, it was won­der­fully ter­ri­ble. It ended as most love sto­ries do and I didn’t recover for a very long time. But in look­ing back I wasn’t in love with him so much as I was in love with the per­son I thought he was.

I have been known to make deci­sions very quickly about men. I have always fallen fast with­out tak­ing into account the risks. I also give peo­ple the ben­e­fit of the doubt too often. I want them to be the great per­son I see in them. Per­haps they haven’t real­ized their full poten­tial yet but I still see the good in them. In turn I fall for the poten­tial rather than the per­son. I am always opti­mistic that they will treat me how I treat them, with respect and con­sid­er­a­tion. Yet this seems to be taken advan­tage of in me. For exam­ple the dis­ap­pear­ing man in my life who sud­denly reap­peared only to dis­ap­pear again, I gave him the ben­e­fit of the doubt and he did exactly what every­one told me he would. Take what he wanted, tell me what I wanted to hear and then dis­ap­pear. Per­haps the sec­ond and third chances I give to peo­ple are wasted. Maybe I am allow­ing myself to merely play a part in other people’s dra­mas. I fill my role and then I am writ­ten out of the story just as quickly as I was intro­duced. I don’t want to be bit­ter and sus­pi­cious of every per­son who I give my affec­tion to. The min­i­mal guard I already have up is cum­ber­some and I don’t want to have it in place any­more. I want to be able to open myself up and let some­one in who wants to fall in love with me.

We have to be our own guardians. We have to make sure the peo­ple we allow to the cen­ter of emo­tional being are wor­thy of our love. But how do we deter­mine who is wor­thy? What are the cri­te­ria? Time is the answer; it is the only true test. Peo­ple can­not fake it for­ever. Time will show if they can reach the poten­tial you have assigned to them. The solu­tion for me mov­ing for­ward is to not fall in love with poten­tial, but rather look at the per­son and see the lim­i­ta­tions and accept them as a real­ity until proven oth­er­wise. As for the choice I need to make now, I am still unclear on how to pro­ceed. I think I’ll start think­ing with my head for starters and leave my heart out of the decision-​​making.

SHE is not Ward.....but I am