Why Doesn’t He Want You?

 ‘Why didn’t you love me?’ Maya sobbed. ‘Why couldn’t you just love me back? What’s wrong with you?’

‘I did.’ Jake said. ‘I did love you. But then you changed. And you didn’t love yourself anymore.’

When we get dumped we usually feel devastated. We sob into pillows, call all our friends to sob some more, drown our sorrows in ice-cream, and pace up and down our bedrooms wailing, “Why didn’t he want me?!”

   But how much of this pain comes from actually losing him, and how much comes from the feelings created by the break-up? Being dumped usually triggers feelings of inadequacy; you fear you're not good enough, you fear you're unlovable. Maybe the pain comes less from losing him and more from losing your sense of self. When you're abandoned by someone you love, or simply feel attached to, you will likely feel unworthy, undesired, unwanted, and this is what hurts so much. 

   When someone rejects us this triggers any feelings of unworthiness we hold inside ourselves. If we didn’t have these feelings, this self-doubt or even self-loathing, then being left wouldn’t hurt so much at all. We’d simply see that we obviously weren’t right for this particular man, nor he right for us. We wouldn’t consider there was anything wrong with us, or deficient, or lacking. We’d know that, being perfectly lovable just as we are, it’d only be a matter of finding the man who is right for us.

   If we don’t love ourselves very much we tend to focus more on what another person thinks of us than what we think of them. This doubles for romantic encounters. We often assume we like him because we’re only really concerned about how much he likes us. He is there to validate us, to prove that we’re okay, that we’re attractive and desirable, and this, in the face of our fragile self-esteem, is what matters most of all.                   

   Of course you are attracted to him, you can feel that tug inside your chest, but this is one situation when the heart can trick us and the head can help us. The tug you feel is the pull of your subconscious and, as such, can often get you in trouble. If you have the tendency to go for unavailable, rejecting, emotionally closed men, for example, then you will feel this tug towards such men and mistake it for love. It will blind you to reality, to the day-to-day facts of a loving relationship. If you use your head you could ask: what is this man really like? How well does he treat me? How does he behave? How kind, compassionate and thoughtful is he?

   When you become aware of your relationship patterns you’ll learn to stop confusing your base urges: the subconscious fish-hooks that have you falling for a man; with your higher instincts: the intuitions you feel when you have your brain wired up to your heart. Then you’ll stop caring about whether or not he wants you, and start assessing whether or not he’d be good for you. And, if he ends the relationship while you’re still deciding, you won’t mind too much because you’ll know that he couldn’t have been the one after all.