Love: Past or Present?

The evening after my conversation my BFTP (you know, the one that I had thought had been relatively successful but which turned out to seemingly ruin everything we had created), I got an email from NY Guy. He was just reminding me that he was arriving in London the next day and that he's sure I must have seen his text telling me that he'd be here for four months. He says he knows that I have moved on and that he respects that. But he still thinks we should meet for coffee or something while he's over here, just to actually meet and say hi. It would mean a lot to him. He says that if he doesn't hear from me, he'll assume that I don't want to meet up, but that he would appreciate a response either way.

I ponder the thought for a while. I have wondered, since everything that has happened recently, whether it was realistic, or even practical of me to think we wouldn't see each other. It's not even that I was completely against the idea, it was more that I knew it would be difficult for both of us and could be potentially unwise of me to put myself in that situation, knowing how fraught and still a little raw the emotions are. In a conversation with BFTP, he said he didn't really see a difference between truly loving someone and being in love with them, in terms of that your love for the person doesn't just disappear just because you aren't together anymore. It got me thinking and I started assessing where I really was emotionally. He's right in some ways; if you really loved someone, the love doesn't magically dissolve when your relationship status does. I know that if I'm honest with myself, I still love The Ex. But perhaps it's just a different kind of love now. I'm not in love with him. I know that when we were together, I truly loved him as a person, even though things weren't always particularly great between us. But that's part of the reason I know I loved him, because I stuck by him. I knew there were things about him that I didn't always like, but I loved him as he was, with all his faults, because I knew that deep down the person he was at his core was a good one.

My problem is that just because you retain a form of love for a person, it doesn't automatically mean you can maintain a relationship with them, even if it's just a casual friendship. Sometimes, you can't ever rebuild any sort of relationship with a person after you have broken up. In other situations, you can, but it may take a long time before it can happen. I think this might be the case with me and The Ex. I still care for him, I still have concern for him, I still occasionally wonder if he is doing OK and feel tempted to call and check. But I know that I can't do that right now, partly because all previous attempts to do so out of this 'love' I have for him, have either ended up being misconstrued on some occasions, or have maybe had dual motives on my part, on others. There is always a difficulty continuing some sort of relationship or contact with an ex, when one or both of you are still single, or have a relationship status that is still undefined. I think with the sort of relationships where the romantic lines have been very definitely crossed at some time in the past, to subsequently maintain a friendship there have to be very clear boundaries. Such boundaries may be hard to stay inside of, if one or both of you still has some romantic feelings for the other, no matter how vague they may be.

In the past, I thought that a clear sign of being over someone you had once had feelings for or been involved with, was not being physically attracted to them anymore. Quite often, when my emotional and romantic attraction or affection for someone has gone, my physical attraction to them also goes. Attraction for me is so intertwined in the way someone is as a person, that if I become disillusioned with their character, their physical appeal gradually dissipates also. But perhaps this only happens when love has turned sour? For a while, I wasn't attracted to The Ex anymore. I saw this as a clear sign that I was definitely over him. But the thing was that I was in love with NY Guy at the time. When I hit a low point and things with NY Guy had seemingly broken down, contact from The Ex revealed to me that I was still attracted to him. But what was I attracted to? Was it just the fact that I was lonely and vulnerable and upset, and that the fact he cared for and wanted me was appealing? Was it that I could see that he had worked on some of the things that were negative about him and had realised some of the things he had done wrong? Was it his apology and contrition for how he had treated me that made him more attractive? Was it just because there is a comfort we have with each other that is so easy to slip back into because it is so familiar to both of us? I'm not really sure what it was, but I'm not sure that any of these reasons are necessarily healthy or good ones. In any case, attraction does not equal love, on any level.

Either way, for all my thinking, I know that in the past I may have confused the two. Or perhaps where the lines became blurred was when I still felt a form of love for a person and still had an attraction to them, even though I didn't want to be with them. I think that's the key. If you know that the relationship isn't right or healthy for you, regardless of whether you love, are in love with or are attracted to the person, it's all irrelevant. I mean, if the only requirement for a successful relationship was a form of love, then I may as well still be with The Ex. But relationships are not that simple and there are many more facets to compatibility that go towards making a partnership successful or not. Staying together takes work, and you need more than just love to make that happen.