how do you unlove someone?

People say that love is hard.

Finding time away from work is hard. Finding a job you like is hard. Finding good flatmates is hard. Even finding good parking on a Friday night is hard.

The word hard is often taken to mean "difficult to do" or "involving a great deal of effort, energy, or persistence" and yes love can be both of these. But it goes beyond hard.

I need a word that includes all these too:
Hurt, doubt, numbness, attachment, hope, sadness, temporary highs and lows, disillusion, confusion, moments of insanity, desperation, total and utter physical, emotional, spiritual and mental defeat.

What happens when the one you love has hurt you and broken your heart? I know all couples have ups and down and times when they have doubts. But how do you recover from that? How can you ever trust in love again?

My bf of 3yrs and I have been going through a rough patch. To be honest I dont know if the bad times are the phases or the good times are phases anymore. Fighting over stupid things - the things that are said end up hurting more than the actual fight. They are never bad enough to leave so we always get through it, but it’s never the same. Walls are being put up. I don’t want to fight anymore and the only way I know how to do this is to stop caring.

I love him but I don’t want to. On the surface everything is OK, but is OK really OK? How do you unlove someone?

I want to see that our fights are stupid and be able to go on like nothing happened once we made up... but something did happen. Somethings were said out of anger but somehow they can’t be unsaid out of love. I know couples fight and they get over it - but why cant I? I want to be able to say "what didn’t kill us made us stronger" but I cant - what didn’t kill us only left us with bruised hearts. He says too much has happened for us to not work it out - but too much has happened that I can’t let go of. I want to stop caring, stop feeling. By letting go of the "future" I can let go of the past.

How can you be with someone and still feel so alone?

I want to forget. Right now I feel... lost, sad, confused.. But I have some hope this feeling will pass - just like it temporarly does every other time. Another part wants to just shut off and leave - but I want to stop loving him before I leave. Slowly I will distance myself, find other things to do in life that doesn’t involve him, and come up with excuses every time there is a family occasion on. I will say I just want to be on my own but really I just want to get used to being without him.

It’s a slow and painful death I know, but I can’t let go until I have stopped loving him and this is the only way I know how to do it. He’s walked away before, I’ve walked away before - I can’t trust that either of us wont ever walk away again. Every time we fight it doesn’t feel like a fight - it feels like a break-up or a threat of a break-up. I just cant live with that pressure anymore.

Pt1. My Quarter Life Crisis

Hi,

My name is Patience Tom.

I'm 26 and am having a Quarter Life Crisis.

They say 40's is the new 30's, but I say 25 is the new 45. Ok so we don’t have bad comb overs but we have more bad hair days, we don’t drive round in flashy Beemers trying to pick up young pretty things but we wonder when we will ever make enough to do that. And though we don’t pretend to be 10 or 20yrs younger than we really are - we still wonder "who" we are, what we are going to do with our lives and have the best parts of it passed us by.

I am 26 and frustrated with where my life is going - often going to bed at night wondering if it’s going anywhere at all. They say we are Gen Y's (or Gen Y not’s) - The Options Generation. We are told we can have everything. Our parents worked their asses off so we can be spoilt brats, living at home till we're 30, picking and choosing jobs/ partners as if we were picking and choosing our shoes.

We are told we don’t want to get married, we don’t want commitment, we don’t want stability, we don’t want to be tied down. It's not cool to want these things. We want to be independent, in control (and as I write this the words of Kanye West/ Daft Punk come to mind) and most importantly we want to be harder, better, faster, stronger than the Gen X'ers before us. We're loud, proud, confident and have something to prove!

Under this illusion that I too can "pick and choose" anything, I have quit my (supposedly glamorous) job as a designer after 2 yrs.

Now with this economic crisis looming I must not forget that I "thrive on deadlines", "have a can-do attitude", "is passionate about making a difference" and will think work can also be "lots of fun".

I'm 26 and tired of being a "Go-Getter". I've travelled, seen the world, done the job-hopping, bar-hopping, bed-hopping thing, spent my entire months salary on a killer outfit with matching killer shoes and matching killer hangover. I've outsmarted and outdone those twice as experienced as me and looked into the eyes of those twice as old as me - half relishing the victory and half terrified of one day becoming that person.

To put it bluntly - I am burnt out.

For all my "success and achievement", hidden deep inside me is a haunting fear that this is as good as it gets.

What I really want to do with my life is become a primary school teacher but looking at the average paycheck compared to a designer’s paycheck, I would have to cut my lifestyle in half. Lets face it, for a 26yr old (even one with a QLC) your lifestyle is your life. Ironically if I hadn't been the go-getter that I believed I had to be, I would never have looked down from the top of the mountain and realised how far it is to slide back down.

So now what? I can’t talk to my parents cos they will just tell me how they spent days and night working in the fields just to have enough to eat, how lucky I am, how unappreciative I am, how I would never survive in their days with my attitude. I can’t tell my friends cos "there's no point sitting round moping" and "every problem has a solution"- I just need to be "creative" about it. I can’t tell my younger sister cos her generation is out to prove they are going to outdo my generation.

So here I am telling you my issues. Wow - I am writing a blog about my issues. If this isn’t a sign of the times then I don’t know what is.

P.S. You may wonder why I have titled my blog “How To Survive A Quarter Life Crisis” and not something like “Quarter Life Sux” but “positive thinking” has been embedded into me and so have rom-com happy endings.