The Longest Moment of Clarity

by: Adam Robinson


I already apologized and I know you forgive me, but there's something I failed to make clear. I don't think the sort of behavior I exhibited on the phone last night is "okay." I have always been fully aware of the status of our relations. I went into our arrangement with total knowledge and have continued to engage in it with that same knowledge.

In denial of this, I accused you of being in denial. I said you disappointed me because I was disappointed in myself. The love I was talking about on the phone is not love. It was an eruption of internal desperation. It had nothing to do with you. In my resolve to restructure my identity, a primary goal was to quell exactly that sort of behavior, to gain some self-control and emotional discernment. This only shows me that I have much father to go in my progress toward change. I didn't think. I lied to myself and thereby to you. If I could take it back everything I said last night, I would and instead, I would say this: 

I love you as a friend, first and only, and hope only for your happiness. My behavior was surely not consistent with this priority.

I would also have ended our "friends with benefits" in calm, rational manner (as I tried to do last week. My back-peddling was only a further show of weakness and lack of self-control.) It's nothing personal. I enjoyed what we had for what it was, and have always known what it was, despite how I sounded last night. One of my new goals in self-restructuring includes the fact that I will never be anyone's friend with benefits again. 

I know you never felt romantically toward me and I know why. You want someone with enough clarity of mind not to engage in unnecessarily hurtful and irrational behavior. Totally understandable. My own feelings of romance were predicated on a set of feelings I imagined you to have, though I knew, consciously, you never possessed them. I agree with you that we are too different, and that there has never, from day one, been any sort of future for you and I. I have always known this, and to tell you otherwise was to let my selfish desire do the talking. It has nothing to do with anything you did, and were you not around, I would have been unleashing it on someone else or myself. 

I've also come to agree with you, that there is no such thing as unrequited love. It's one-sided. So it's not love.


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