The Brain and the Heart

Have you ever been caught in one of those situations when your brain is telling you to do one thing while your heart is telling you to do another? I know I get caught in situations like that all of the time. Usually I do the stupid thing and follow my heart, because it seems to be my heart that makes me feel like something is right, instead of just making me weigh pros and cons and choose the logical option.

My heart is stupid. It gets me into trouble and throws me into situations that I'm just not ready to handle. I followed my heart when I chose my first college and that ended up turning into the most epic disaster in my life. If I had taken the time to really sit and think things through instead of doing what felt right maybe I wouldn't have ended up in that situation.

Right now I'm caught in one of those situations. I have to make a decision and my heart and my brain can't seem to agree with each other. I know that I should listen to my brain on this one, but my heart is speaking very strongly this time and I can't ignore what it has to say.

I've struggled with depression for several long years now. It's not an easy struggle, but I've been doing relatively well for the last several months, especially with the end of the unhealthy relationship that I was in. Now that I am single again, I realize that I will eventually have to deal with potential boyfriends again. My most recent romantic relationship was also my first, and I was disheartened by the ending, which was painful. This isn't the first relationship I've had end in a painful way, though it was my first romantic one, and because of past difficulties I've had a lot of trouble forming new relationships, trusting other people, and being willing to enter into any romantic relationships. I put my whole heart into this last one, giving myself over entirely to my partner, and that ended badly for me. I'm afraid to go through that pain again. The fear comes from the depression. I worry that if I continue to get hurt that I won't be able to continue fighting the depression and it will overwhelm me.

I also hate being alone. While many people will say it's perfectly fine that I didn't date until I was twenty, it is unusual. Most of my friends - even ones more quiet and shy than me - dated throughout high school. I honestly got to the point where I thought no one would ever ask me out or that I wasn't, for whatever reason, a date-able person. I resigned myself to being alone for the rest of my life. Now that I have finally had a taste of what it's like to be in a relationship (the good parts, not the bad) I don't want to go back to thinking I'll be alone forever.

All of this plays into my current dilemma. When I was a junior in college, living in Montana, there was a guy at home - significantly older than me - who expressed feelings for me (that's putting it mildly). At the time I was working through some issues that I had with men - fears that were leftover from several experiences throughout the last 20 years of my life. His messages telling me how he felt upset me and stressed me out and I avoided talking to him as long as I could before I was finally able to deal with the situation and tell him that we couldn't be together. I decided this because I had been trying to recover from depression and find out if I had a personality disorder that would have been the cause of some of my behaviors and experiences. Not only that, but he had his own mental problems that had not been diagnosed yet.

We were a bad match. That's all there was to it at the time. It wasn't that I didn't like him. This man is a sweetheart. I knew that he cared about me. That alone would have made me happy. On top of that, I had feelings for him, too, even though I was trying my best to bury them. In that case, I let my brain win out over my heart because it was a time when I needed to focus on ME.

I am still friends with this man, even to this day. I still suffer from depression, and he suffers from his own mental illness and is even more handicapped by it than I am. His life has not been easy. I haven't even been able to piece together everything that he's been through, outside of what other people have told me and small hints that I pick up in my conversations with him. What I do know is that he still feels something for me. What that something is, I'm never too sure. I think he knows that I tend to shy away from him if he goes back to what he first said when I was still in college. I can see in his messages (we talk via messaging systems at the moment) that he changes the words around. For example, he uses phrases such as "i want to try see something in someone else that i don't get to see but may be once in a life time" and when I ask him what he means he gives me vague responses about friendship or love, but never really explains himself. The last time he mentioned wanting to be with me (he added in "despite our situations" when he mentioned it) I practically interrogated him, so it doesn't surprise me that he's careful in his own, strange ways.

Within the last few months there have been several times when he has asked me to come and hang out with him or get coffee with him. I want to say yes. My heart tells me that I should go. My brain says that it will encourage him to pursue me. The fact still stands that we are a bad match. Our mental illnesses would conflict. We would hurt each other without realizing it. On top of that, he's eight years older than me and, at the moment, can't live on his own. He gets money from the government each month. I want to have children, raise a family, have a home of my own. I need someone who can do that with me; someone who can support a family. I don't think he's capable of that. I don't even know if he's capable of maintaining a normal relationship. Things are different with him than they would be with another man. If my last dream weren't to have a family, then maybe it wouldn't matter so much. But at the age of twenty-two I'm at least ready to start looking for someone to settle down with.

That is what my brain is telling me. It makes sense, but I'm still torn between what my brain says and what my heart feels. Because when I think about this man I feel something. I want to reach out and take care of him. I want to be the friend that he needs. Maybe I want to be more than that. I know that going with my heart on this one would be a bad idea. The problem is that it's a lot easier to do what you feel is right than it is to do what you think is right. Feelings are powerful. Love, fear, hope, sadness...feelings are the basis of who we are. Our thoughts aren't any less important, but it's easier to push them aside.

Feelings are important. Always consider them. But don't forget to pay attention to your brain as well. Sometimes it has something just as important to say as your heart.

Accepting less than we deserve.

When it comes to love I tend to believe that you don't necessarily deserve any specific type of person. You don't deserve someone amazing just because you're a good person who does good things, and you don't deserve someone less than amazing because you have a hard life or get into trouble a lot. Just because people think I'm intelligent, loyal, or kind doesn't mean that I deserve to be with a saint. Love is about who you want to be with, not what you deserve. It's about who makes you happy and who you choose to love. If you deserve anything, it's to be with the person you love.

While I still hold quite firmly to that belief, I have come to realize that there are things that people do deserve when it comes to a significant other.

Every girl and every boy, every man and every woman, no matter who they are, what they've been through, or where they are in their life, deserves to be respected, especially by a significant other. You deserve to be happy, to be with the one that you love, but you also deserve to be with someone who respects who you are and how you feel. Respect is important in any relationship.

I spent a year and a half with a boy whom I loved very much. I say boy for a reason, even though he recently turned twenty-one. There was more than one time when he tried to break up with me. His excuses were that I deserved better than him, or I should try to date other people. I didn't believe either of those things. I fought to keep us together because I loved him more than I had ever loved before. I didn't care that we fought all the time. I didn't mind his pig-headed tenacity that caused so many of the fights. I was more than willing to put up with his childish comments and persistent offensive behavior because I loved him. Ultimately, my love for him was all that mattered to me. When he told me that I deserved better than him I disagreed because I believed that I deserved to have the person that I was in love with.

I failed to realize then that I wasn't receiving the respect that I deserved from him. Every time we fought he ended up making empty promises to change. He promised to stop brushing off my complaints - that he was ignoring me, that he wasn't taking me seriously, that he was talking rudely to me - as if they were jokes. He promised to stop swearing at me as much. He promised to stop smacking my butt and grabbing my breasts constantly, though especially in public. In the end, he broke every single one of those promises, and more. In the end, he tossed me to the curb and refused to speak to me, as if all of our problems were my fault. When he ended things I begged him for two weeks to take me back, without even so much as a "no" from him. He ignored every message, every plea. I loved him more than anything or anyone, and he had said that he loved me the same. Then suddenly he turned his back on me. I was lost, confused, and hurt.

At first I thought that I might wait for him to change his mind and come back. Then, when he continued to ignore me (at this point I was trying to get his Sprint account and pin number so I could switch my phone off his plan), I realized that I really did deserve better. Yeah, I loved the guy more than anything in the world. I would have gone to hell and back for him. But I realized that, no matter how much I loved him, he wasn't worth my time anymore. Maybe I did deserve to be with the one I loved, but I did not deserve to be tossed to the curb while he was still claiming that he loved me and wanted to be with me forever. I didn't deserve to be completely ignored by the person I loved so much. Love isn't always worth that kind of pain.

I made a big decision in the third week after he ended things. I decided that I deserved a man, not a boy. I deserved someone who could handle relationship problems maturely and who respected me and my feelings. My ex had stopped showing me respect months before he broke things off. I should have ended things then and there, but I was caught up in wanting something that was less than what I deserved. In a sense, I was settling for the first thing that came along that seemed to satisfy my need to love someone.

The last message (apart from the ones when I was trying to get those damn account numbers!) I sent to him was this: "You were right. I do deserve better. I deserve someone who respects me." After I switched my phone back to my parents' plan I removed his number, deleted him from Facebook, and removed any remaining message threads I had from him. I still think about him every day, and he will always have a place in my heart. But if I had to choose between him and being alone for the rest of eternity, I would choose to be alone. I know that I deserve something better than him, no matter how much I love him.

It's not just about who you love. It's about who loves you enough to treat you with the respect that you deserve.