The Three Musketeers
1, 2, 3 and ACTION!
Sometimes I wonder, what if it did not end up that way? What if we were still talking, still friends, still… more than that.
The thing about maturity is that you realise you aren’t able to follow your own advice. You realise that the reasons they left you were justified. You realise the way you acted wasn’t fair to them. You realise that it’s way too late to start realising now.
In my life, I’ve only had romantic relationships with three women. I like to classify them as:
1. The First Love.
2. The Desperate Attempt at moving on from the first.
3. The Realisation.
I learnt how to love – how to put someone on a pedestal – before I learnt who I am. My identity was “the guy who loves that girl who doesn’t love him back”. Not amongst my friends or classmates, no. That was who I was to myself.
Perhaps that’s why I went running back to her, even though I knew inside that reading the same book twice wouldn’t change the ending. It’s cliché, but it’s true. I think I wasn’t ready to accept that we weren’t meant for each other. I was stubborn; I didn’t want to move on. Well, I couldn’t even if I wanted to.
So, when I finally got fed up with seeing her with someone other than me, I tried finding someone else. And nowadays, it’s really not that difficult to find someone to talk to. Someone you can be friends with; someone you can be… more than friends with.
Just like that, two teenagers with broken hearts started dating in the hopes that they could move on from the one who broke it in the first place.
Sadly, one of them would never be able to move on. And the other one, well, they fell for someone who was never theirs to begin with.
I think about her a lot. I regret the way I started distancing myself. I regret that I wasn’t able to give her the attention she needed from me.
But I don’t regret that phase in my life because I started writing to understand how I felt, what I felt. I started finding the flaws in myself, and I started fixing them as much as I could. I could never regret a part of my life that ended up shaping the better me.
I don’t know what she learnt or realised from our short relationship, but hopefully, she looks back at it and smiles. Not because of the regret of us never lasting, but because we were once more than acquaintances; we were once… more than friends.
After that endeavour, I began talking to a lot more people on the internet. Most of them were, well, ordinary to say the least. But some of them? They were diamonds in a landfill, rare, unexpected, but somehow still shining despite where I found them.
One of those diamonds was the one I classified as “The Realisation”. We became friends in late February of 2025. We got pretty close by April, and my friends at school often shipped me and her, though I had no such feelings for her.
By the end of May, however, I did not feel that way. I thought I had developed feelings for her, and by June, I confessed. She reciprocated. I wrote poems for her, talked to her every day.
I often confused being “platonically close” with someone as “having romantic feelings” for them. This wasn’t the last time I made that mistake either; I made it again a few months later, but that’s a story for another time.
Somewhere in the middle of talking every day and writing poems for her, I forgot what “love” actually meant. I opened up to her about my mental health issues, and she supported me. She listened to me. Perhaps she shouldn’t have done that.
Since that day, all I really talked about was the negative things happening in my life. Whenever we had a long conversation, it would just be my trauma-dumping. It ruined the relationship, quite frankly. I thought we were getting closer, when in reality, she was drifting away.
The reason we separated is quite similar, but it’s a little more complicated than that. The point I’m trying to make is that I learned something very important from that relationship.
Love isn’t trauma-dumping.
Love isn’t obsession.
Love isn’t absolute dependency.
Love isn’t found through desperation.
Love isn’t putting someone on a pedestal.
And love is never found through sacrificing your own values, your self-respect, and your identity.
Love is a symbiotic relationship where both individuals are interdependent on each other. They are honest with each other, they are affectionate with each other, but more importantly, they’re always safe. Because that’s always what it has been about.
Safety.