My Experience of Love vs Choice: Why someone can Love You and Still Leave

I was smiling while writing this headline. I remembered something. It was so confusing that if I had noted all that down, which came after the confusion, why she isn’t choosing me would create a trail of words that would reach Mars and even beyond. Sometimes my thoughts still move towards the unknown like voyagers chasing the end of the universe, but I shut them down because now, I know that it doesn’t matter anyway. We all tend to think of relationships in very linear and black-and-white or binary or yes-or-no situations. Relationships are more complex than we can imagine, especially when love is real. This confusion between love and choice can only occur with genuine love. Since you are asking this question, Why someone can Love You and Still Leave, I am assuming that you believe you encountered a mutual love that did not have a good ending, or that love never ended or stopped, or it started and never stopped. This is my story of how I ended up in a confusing situation where she had to let me go, which kept me wondering what was that which was between us and why she still let me go.

Why does someone fall in love in the first place

To understand the dynamics behind “Love vs Choice: Why Someone Can Love You and Still Leave,” we first need to understand why someone falls in love in the first place. You all have experienced, we all experience love in our unique way, and fall in love also in our unique way. How one can fall in love depends on how the personality of person is developed and how much risk that person can take to take any decisive action for love. Also, what matters is not how deep you can love, but how much autonomy and decision-making power you have over your own life. Let me explain this,

Love is not what we decide. That is why we say, I fell in love with him/her. Love cannot be what, that is controlled. Love is an uncontrolled emotion. We just fall in love with the heavenly purpose created by the gods.

For me, love started without any warning. I just started noticing her more, watching how she smiles, talks, and then one day, I felt jealous when I saw her with another male co-worker. That’s how I knew that I was in love with her.

Tragedy of Love and Choice

Now, that we can’t control this emotion of love, but what we can/anyone can control is what we do about that love.

For me, love started, was acknowledged, and accepted by her post multiple interactions, and the way love naturally develops within two individuals.  Yet, I found something is off, and this is not moving the way it should move for the betterment of this relationship. She slowly started to make distance and detach from me. Possibly, she started realizing that this can end painfully, and we both can get hurt badly. On one intense day, we had some misunderstandings, and she directly told me that she respects this love and relationship, but she can not choose to be with me further. I asked her, what everyone would ask, “Then why do you let this develop in full scale love story in the first place?” Her response was satisfactory yet confusing; she replied, “Because I fell in love.”

What I learnt from this, Love vs Choice Tragedy?

For many, love is a linear movement from dating to marriage. In many cases, it is simply yes or no. But after intense overthinking, my mind concluded and accepted that multiple-colored it is not easy as it looks. Love and relationships are like multiple colored, multi – dimensional entities that have no end and no start, they just exist.

When you experience something like this, which I experienced, I initially thought that it was not that serious for her. In such cases, our mind tries to create stories to close the gap between what we understand and what we don’t understand. I even accepted that, maybe she doesn’t love me, and she pretended everything. But then I asked, what if? Was what she said true? And she still let me go, despite her love for me?

It is not necessary that love will always have an end

Over the years, I started to accept that, even if she accepted that she loved me, she finally chose not to be with me for reasons only she can know / or maybe she even doesn’t know.

But for many such cases reasons can be as simple as,

1. She/He loved you initially, but later realized it was not love.
2. She/He had pre-defined expectations from a relationship, and she didn’t find any in yours.
3. Her/His family had pre-defined expectations about their son’s or daughter’s marriage, and she/he didn’t want to hurt their feelings.  (Typical Asian Parents)
4. Even if she/he was adult, they didn’t have the maturity and honesty to convert that love into a working relationship and then marriage.

In many such rejections (Yes, technically it is still rejection) are because of financial and family or cultural expectations.

Why this experience of confusion of Love vs Choice is not a Bad experience

As I told you earlier, love is an emotion that cannot be controlled. You can fall in love with a person,

1. Who is married.
2. Elder than you more than expected by society.
3. Younger than accepted by society.
4. Rich and beyond your reach.
5. Poor, you will not have sustained future.
6. Many more, legal-illegal, moral-immoral reasons because love in a mind is still a thought, and when it becomes action, it can become legal-illegal, moral-immoral, required-not required, right or wrong, bad or good.

Risk-Taking Ability is the greatest Decision Maker when Choosing vs Love.

According to my experience, love bypasses all the rules and controls set by humans, and maybe that is why in some stories, love is considered to be taboo. Take an example of “Story of Troy” and love the chosen story of Paris and Helen. They weren’t supposed to get together because she was a wife of a king. She may have chosen to be with her abductor/lover for unknown reasons, but she took a very big risk.  

For this reason, I am not agreeing with Keanu Reeves statement, “If you don’t fight for love, what kind of love do you have?” Because, If I love someone, and knowing that my love would harm her, why would I fight for her? then I must Reply Keenu that, “If I know, my love his going to hurt her, what kind of love I have?”. I can take any risk but I cannot hurt her even if it costs me losing her love.

Now apply this risk-taking ability in above mentioned situations,

1. Married – If she / he is already married, will she/he face the consequences for loving? In many cases, it is not. This situation is too much completed to take any risk.
2. Elder/Older – Say, a girl in her thirties falls in love with a man in his fifties, in many societies this is not acceptable. Common man/women would never risk anything for this kind of relationship.
3. Rich/Poor- Expectation and lifestyle mismatch. Even if accepted by everyone, the person who may have to downgrade their lifestyle always has to sacrifice his/her wants and needs.

So, as I said earlier falling in love in not in control of individual but choosing to stay with love can be decided. So, the person who isn’t willing to take risk and sacrifice something for love always going to reject to be with the person they love. Because for them, according to them as per my understanding they are rejecting the situation and not the person they love.

Is it still love? If they aren’t ready to take risks and sacrifice things for you?

I think yes, if they have told you that they love you and they showed care and what every person in love would show, then definitely that was love. Many people and even AI models would tell you that, if they weren’t ready to take a risk for you or sacrifice something for you, then it was not love. People, in general, or if you can observe, you also try to close any such ambiguity with yes or no conclusion, or we always try to make any complex situation simple.

When anyone /AI concludes that it was not love, you need to understand that they are working on limited information provided by you. Only you can experience and recall what you experienced, even if you put full effort to put everything you experienced in words, listener. Even if AI is not going to invest in it as much as you were invested and interested. Because for them, it is just another story, but for you it was special.

I always believe in my experience as I told you earlier, love is not linear or has any start and end. If you experienced that, she/he loved you, then yes, she/he loved you at that point of time. Maybe they do not love you now, but they loved you once and that is what you/we all need to listen.

What can you do anyway if they loved you but didn’t choose you?

Honestly, when I felt that, I too was confused. Some people are not clear about emotions and their choices, but since she/ he told you that they love you and can’t choose you, then you need to respect their clarity. Clarity sometimes is very hard and bitter to digest, but at least they didn’t drag you into unlimited,, never-ending confusion by keeping you on hold and that’s admirable.

When she told me that she can’t choose to be with me couldn’t, initially, I was confused but later I accepted and respected her clarity. It may still look like a rejection but believe me what you experienced was not a rejection but a complicated situation wherein she took the in-messed-up lead to handle that messed up situation with more clarity than I ever had at that point of time.

So , when you have that question that what can you in this/such situation, what you can do is accept and respect their clarity. This wasn’t about love anymore but it was about the situation.

Do they hurt when they choose against Love?

I am not going to say that, I didn’t know, tells or we can’t know. My experience telling me that when they choose not to be with you, they break and recover themselves before telling you that they can’t be with you henceforth mentioned below. The following, and for below mentioned reasons I am saying this,

1. They clearly made a decision, people just don’t take such a difficult decision to hurt someone just by saying or thinking, lets cut it off. No, normal human would never do that.
2. Love is highest level of emotion a human can have, if you have the experienced love with them earlier? they you need to note that they were capable to process complex emotional load and emotion and they were not naïve to fall in love and to decide not to choose you clearly. If they were naïve, she / he would have left you guessing and would not have given a clear closure ever.  What I am trying to say here is, combination of not being naïve and having a clear decision-making ability in such complex situation proves that, that human loved you cleanly.
3. And if, any such human who clearly understands human emotions who would not just move on that easily.  Even if they didn’t tell you that it hurt them, they already calculated a possibility that if you came to know that this hurt them then you will hurt too.

I am not saying that what happened with me, happened with you too and I am also not claiming that this is what happens ,but what ,, am proposing here is that you need to be optimistic to understand this situation like I did.

Honest advice from me to you is, they choose their path, stop following their path and stop trying to find the answers. You need to just move on?

You can find a new love here?