I've only really been in one long relationship, but I've been in love twice and it's from those short but great experiences that I draw on for this hub. I often reminisce about my long relationship in a negative way. In retrospect, I was never in love with this person and the reason I reminisce is because I'm disappointed that I stayed in the relationship for as long as I did. I may not have loved this person but I trusted her to be the best she could (at least around me) and even to this day I feel betrayed because she wasn't.  The worst of it is that I feel like she didn't even try, like I wasn't worth the effort. I feel like she just used me. I put so much into that relationship with no returns because I trusted her and thought that I would eventually get something back but in the end I only feel like a sucker.

The two times I was in love were great though.  Tragic but great nonetheless. The first time was when I was young and I loved foolishly.  That was the youngest I've ever been with my love. Nothing ever became of it but that's fine. Sometimes I think about what could have been but only very rarely. What really stuck with me about the experience was how I fell in love because that's how I know that I was actually in love. I know because I don't know; I have no idea how I fell in love. A girl who was previously just a girl in a split second became everything. In the blink of an eye I suddenly felt more of a connection to another entity than I had ever felt before. It was like I was struck by lightening. Like I said though, it was very short lived.  I had to wait 8 years until I would be hit by the same lightning bolt again. Over those 8 years, however, I became callused. I became a cynic and leaned towards pessimism when it came to the issue of other people and especially trust. I became jaded; my roommate in college used to joke that I was "the most jaded mother f*****" that he had ever met and he, unfortunately, had a past similar to mine. When I was hit by that lightning bolt for the second time though I felt like I was back in grade school; I hadn't changed at all. I was optimistic and joyous and talkative and gleaming with excitement for what the world had in store for me. So it doesn't matter what I thought I had become or how I thought I had changed because in reality I never did. When you stumble across someone who brings out that side of you, it shocks you back to normal before you know what hit you. And I say normal because that is normal, there's no advantage to being cynical: Oscar Wilde said a cynic is "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."  What really drives my cynicism away though, besides the wisdom of Oscar Wilde, is how much I doubted that I would find somebody as special over those 8 years and how quickly that changed.  So as Steve Carell says at the end of Dan In Real Life, "plan to be surprised."