Feeding or Starving Your Ego?

I have never seen more passionate responses to any of my articles than the Boom, Boom, Ciao I wrote last week. Some of them were even borderline angry! What other subject on earth can raise such strong feelings, but the subject of love? Still, I was a bit taken aback my take on the relationship dynamics would stir such feelings. I have never received more comments and DM’s on the subject; women asking me to downright explain myself.

If you didn’t read my last post, you can catch up here. Let me rewind a bit and explain what this intensity is all about. A few weeks ago I watched a TV-show “Money Heist” on Netflix (an absolute must-watch), and the writing blew my mind. In one episode, the character said a monologue that stopped me in my tracks. It shifted my mind and put a definition to a concept I often thought about, but never really verbalized out loud.

The quote was:

“In the matters of the heart, there is the lover and the beloved. The lover lives with passion, full commitment and romanticism. The beloved, is limited to being idolized. I’m not saying that being a lover is bad, don’t get me wrong, but you have to know what happens. You suffer. A lot. Beloved is having the better time. Its the law of love, I’m sorry. That’s the way it is.”

Lover. And the beloved. THE BELOVED IS LIMITED TO BEING IDOLIZED. I haven't read something so poignant, scary, true, real, frightening, yet weirdly satisfying.

And that is where the trouble with my post started. I then said:

“I can not believe I have never though about this concept. But I felt it. I lived it. Almost every time. One was the lover and one was the beloved. I was either, or. But never equally the same.”

Somehow, this offended people. Women that were invested in my very public relationship that lasted almost a decade, read that as a diss, a confirmation I never really loved my then-boyfriend, as much as he loved me. And he was very, very public about showing his love for me. That cemented their disappointment with my words.

One person wrote — “Noooo, please don’t say that, and don’t crush my childhood illusions about the ideal love that you guys were!”

Another person told me angrily that she collected all the magazine cut-outs of our interviews in the media where we spoke out about our love and that she’s disappointed to realize true love does not exist after all.

And so on.

I never felt the need to respond to any opinions about me. But this time, I really felt I should explain myself on the subject, as I do not want to be the person that crushes someone’s ideals of love, nor do I want to be the person that represents this for you.

It’s a huge responsibility, oftentimes even a pressure; I constantly get messages about our relationships and how disappointed people were when we broke up. I care about young girls not being disheartened with love, and it’s important to not idolize or idealize something you actually might not know enough details about, which leads you to assumptions.

Assumptions are bad. We won’t endorse them.

So here goes:

First of all, I never said I didn’t love him. Nor I said I loved him less than he loved me. He was just more vocal about his love, and if you know me from that period of my life you know about my very public and constant issues with media, assumptions, and inventing narratives. You know I always saw media as a necessary evil. He was just more comfortable with it than me.

What I meant was our dynamic was different. I was more relaxed, and he was very dramatic about us. That is just how we expressed it to the public. The expression of the feeling and the actual feeling are two separate things.

Moreover, your disappointment about the concept of an expiration date on love is simply wrong. The love you talk about is the simple, basic love that I don’t engage in. What he and I had is beyond that love. It was love in its truest form, without any games, power plays, vanities, or ego.

True love in its absolute form is actually not about having to be together until you die or bringing babies into this world. It’s being happy that the person you love exists in this world and she might need to exist somewhere further than you, and you are ok with that. It’s the simplest, purest, most concentrated love that the kind of people that settle just can not understand.

It’s the love that lets you go be what you need to be, and do what you need to do.

The relationship is one thing. Love is another thing. A relationship consists of many things. There’s the way you see this person, there’s the way he/she makes you feel, there's the type of sex you have with this person, and there’s the lifestyle they lead. You can love someone, and still have some of those things not work for you.

The most common question I get from every single human being is why I left my relationship. Actual details you won’t ever know and I’m sorry for that, that is private, but the details are not relevant here. People break relationships because some of the things I named in the previous paragraph do not work for them.

There are two types of relationships. Stability and growth. The CEO of Hinge Justin McLeod explained it perfectly:

“I find some people very growth-orientated and some people very stability-orientated. Some always want to change, grow, learn new stuff; some are very content — there’s nothing wrong with this — with routine, safety and security.”

Love is one thing. You love a person. But then, it comes down to math. A relationship is — math. What kind of person are you, and what kind of relationship do you want? Both people need to want the same kind of relationship. I’m a very growth-oriented person. I’m not the type for anything stagnant, like “this person feels nice” type of relationship.

I don’t like static, known, or too familiar; I need to constantly move, learn, and grow. I’m hungry for the world, creation, specific kind of physical touch, and I wasn’t the same person at the beginning of that relationship, and at the end. My math just did not add up, and after years and years of trying and not having the life I want, I left.

The thing that confuses you guys here is — love has nothing to do with all of that. You can love someone with all your heart, and still not be able to combine the lifestyle you want with the one they want. The relationship can end, but love does not end. It’s just a different kind of love, it's not romantic or sexual, but it's the most human one.

It’s actually an even better kind of love. It’s stripped of any ego, power plays over one another; it’s the type of love where you truly care about the wellbeing of the other person, and you have his best interest in heart and you would dig anyone’s eyes out who dares say something bad about him in your presence.

So you don’t need to tear your magazine articles about us, and you don’t need to be disappointed. Keep them if it makes you believe in something you want to aspire to. He and I are soulmates, just not as lovers; but as human beings, no matter where we are, and that’s something you should definitely aspire to.

Another question I got is about — vanity. Ego. Woman’s vanity. I got asked about my ex’s new girlfriend and how I can be so chill about him being with someone new. The person who asked me went on to say how she broke up with someone and then saw him with someone else and lost it, even though she ended the relationship. She was asking me how I have this chill mentality, annoyed that she doesn’t. Annoyed she feels anger towards her ex’s new girlfriend, even though she is the one that left him.

She also mentioned Gwyneth Paltrow and how she read about Gwyneth coming to her ex-husband’s new girlfriend’s birthday party and she was so hurt by not being the type of person who can do that, she simply assumed and convinced herself in this ridiculous narrative how Gwyneth and her ex-husband must have some business together so they have to play nice or she never loved him in the first place, if she can be so cool.

See that right there? “She must have never loved him if she was cool with being around him and his new girlfriend”. All I can say to the person that thinks that —  you have so much more growing to do. This is not about Gwyneth or love or ego or jealousy, this is just about you. You need to stop reacting, instead, take time, think, grow, and evolve.

How did I get to this point?

I did exactly that. I grew. I wasn’t always like this, I worked on myself. Hard. When I was 18, I had a boyfriend in my hometown, and when I went to college in a different town where my ex-boyfriend lived, my current boyfriend started to act super insecure. He kept telling me I will for sure meet up with my ex and leave him, regardless of my repeating to him I won’t. I wasn’t even thinking about it until he mentioned it.

His fear was somewhat understandable, my ex was a super hot basketball player. My current boyfriend’s constant rage and jealousy about it started to turn me off so badly; I couldn’t think or study, and I was thinking of maybe ending things with him, I couldn’t take it anymore.

When I returned home for the Easter holiday from school, our mutual friend told me he slept with three girls I knew well. And he made sure the mutual friend tells me.

I came home from that conversation, sat down for lunch, and felt 3 huge blisters erupt on my lip, in real time. While I was sitting, waiting for food. My dad was looking at my face with, what the hell is happening to you, are you turning into a lizard in front of my eyes, what’s going on — look on his face.

To this day (actually, I had it last week), the 3 connected blisters always erupt on the exact same spot, on my upper right lip. When I finished dinner that night, I went to my room, sat in front of the empty wall, had a little heart attack from what I just heard, and said to myself — this happened now, and it will never ever happen again in your life.

I pepped talked myself: “You will now figure this thing out and you will never in your life be affected by men or jealousy or bitterness or rage over anyone, ever again”. The mark is permanently on my lip, still there, to always remind me of this lesson and growth.

I was 18, barely an adult, and I explained this to myself, like simple math (as you noticed by now, I see everything in life mathematically) — jealousy is useless, cheating is never about you not being good enough, its always about the person doing it, not you, and anyone that does not see your worth is just a person you don’t need in life.

Jealousy is actually counter-productive if you want to achieve anything. Here you are, worried someone might like someone else over you, while you’re raging with jealousy, and that is supposed to make you more appealing? It makes you the exact opposite. I just don’t see the logic there.

But being chill and respecting yourself, knowing your worth, will actually get you the results you want. It didn’t happen overnight, but slowly, I started to be so unbothered, that all my next boyfriends thought I don’t care enough about them. Nothing or no one could get a reaction out of me.

Let me put it like this, I value myself way too much and I think I’m way too cool to be looking and snooping and worrying when I know what I bring to the table. I know not everyone is the same, but if you can work on yourself, and try to adopt this way of mentality, you will start seeing everything much more realistically, instead of thinking everything is a conspiracy against you.

A few years back I saw a picture of my ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend, now wife, and I actually posted it on my social media, saying I like them together. People were so shocked, they thought its some power play, some diabolical game I’m playing; the comments on the article in media that picked it up were — “Well, she must have never even loved him if she can be this chill”.

Again the same thing. Connecting chillness with a lack of love; while being hysteric about someone must mean true love.

Utterly wrong.

If you ever truly loved someone, you are happy they‘ve ’met someone that can be to them what you couldn’t be.

Everything else is just ego.

Being chill is being an evolved human being, who understands people aren’t toys and their lives don’t serve the purpose of feeding or starving your ego. Instead, stay on the path of why you left someone or something; no one ever left something that was good for them.

Your instincts, the ones that got you out of somewhere, know what’s best for you, even when your head interferes with it. Clean your energy of ego and vanity, and fill it with an aspiration of finding that thing (or a person) that ticks all of your boxes!