We’ve all, at some point, done too much, or have overcompensated in a “situationship” to prove to the man we care for and can see ourselves in a relationship with, that we are capable of being the woman of their dreams. The reality is that maybe we aren’t, in fact, the person for them. Maybe they aren’t ready for what we’re ready for. Maybe they have someone else in mind, or maybe they just want to be single for a while. Whatever the reason, it’s a hard concept to accept, especially when we know how much we have given in the “situationship”.

But nonetheless, eventually, we have to make the decision to walk away and pursue the type of love life that we want and deserve. Or, we can choose to stay, and wait and hope that they choose to commit solely to us. I say this from personal experience. I chose to walk away from a few men in my past for some of these exact reasons. Was it depressing? It sure was.

Each time I would hear an ex say, “Oh I am not ready for a relationship” or “I just want to be single,” I would immediately try to overcompensate. Regardless of their reasons (re: excuses), I would think “do more”, “show him just what he will be missing…” Naturally, this way of thinking was a recipe for disaster: The relationships never went anywhere, and the more I overcompensated and the longer I stayed, the more my self-esteem took a beating.

In my last “situationship”, I stayed committed to him for almost two years, two years in which I was constantly looking for him to commit to me. The moment he told me that he did not want anything more than a friendship, I immediately thought I had to do more, in turn, devaluing my worth and destroying my self-esteem. The more I tried to prove my love to him, and tried to get him to commit to me, the more he would reject me. I had become so emotionally exhausted that I decided to walk away. But, of course, you walk away and that is when they run after you.

He spotted all of my insecurities and noticed my need to be validated by a man and, in a passive aggressive fashion, he walked all over me. It was the most conflicted situation: In one breath, he would say he loved me but didn’t want to be with me. And in the other, when, God forbid, I would try to leave to just do me, he would try to get me back.

If he did not want what I wanted at the time, he should have just allowed me to walk away. But instead of being selfless, he chose to be selfish – he fed me a bunch of excuses for why he couldn’t’t commit, all in the hopes of keeping me around.
I must say it worked for a while. But when I finally came to my senses, I wondered: what kind of person would recognize someone else’s weaknesses and use them to their advantage? The audacity of him now looking back, the nerve of him for taking advantage of my broken ways.

At that point, I had to ask myself why I had this need to be validated by a man. It was not the first, but it was the most intense situation I had yet to experience. I had experienced so much rejection from him that I thought something was wrong with me.

Why did I think I needed this man who constantly rejected me? Why did I stay so long with someone who did not see my worth? And what was it about me that made it so hard to walk away from him?

What that experience taught me was that, subconsciously, I was looking for a man to validate me, and when he would reject me instead, I would feel unworthy of a man’s love. So one part of me was looking to be validated, and another part couldn’t handle the rejection.

As I write this, I get a bit teary eyed because now I finally realize that my validation does not come from any other person. But back then, I honestly gave him too much control over how I viewed myself in relationships. But I learned to acknowledge my self-worth. Although it was always there, sometimes people come into your life and make you second guess who you are. Or, they see what you are lacking and they fill that void, but with bad intentions. Looking back, I now know for sure that that particular ex saw the empty spaces in my life and he filled them in all the wrong ways.

Thing is, I forgave him and moved on in the end, because I understood that him rejecting me had everything to do with how he felt about himself, and very little to do with me. The lesson learned? That validation can’t come from any other person. It can – and should – only come from within.

Keemah.G