For my last partner I actually moved to a country that I didn’t like very much in the first place and of course it went all wrong, because I gave up too much for him and he wasn’t ready for this kind of commitment. The last 5 months were generally quite good. Being single is not too bad at all. Still, there were sad moments, where I missed him and where I didn’t know how I would ever find anyone like him again (well, a little bit more mature would be nice). I didn’t really want to accept the reality of things: I made a mistake in coming to England because of a guy. I made a mistake in trusting solely in love. The real world just doesn’t work like that. We’re so full of illusions when it comes to love and relationships, because we’re looking for the fluffy Hollywood love! Think about those Hollywood films: The film ends when the two finally kiss and then they live happily ever after, right? Well, no, the first kiss and the first few months are always easy and rosé and fluffy and then reality kicks in! Hollywood love leads to hollywood divorce and that’s that.

How do we make a long distance relationship work? How do we cope with an immature partner who loves us dearly, but with whom it is impossible to have children, because he’s still a kid himself? How do we make it work in the real world? Well, sometimes it just doesn’t work out! You realize that he’s too immature, that the distance is too big and that you just can’t deal with it. For me it didn’t have anything to do with love. I didn’t suddenly stop loving. I didn’t suddenly stop having fantasies about a future with him. Nothing changed where feelings were concerned. At some point I just couldn’t bear the constant fighting anymore. He made me too angry. He hurt me too much. Enough was enough! And still, after a while the anger goes away and what do you do then? You think of him and you just feel: ouch, you still love him so much and still can’t be together with him! Frustration, anger that you didn’t see it coming, well, lately the most frequent thought was, that I was stupid! So stupid to believe that everything would just work out, because we love each other.

Somehow I ended up still hoping that everything would work out! One day he would just wake up and be grown up enough to stop the bullshit. I hoped that losing me would drive him to grow up faster. In the last 5 months nothing of this sort happened. In fact my hope kept me where I was. Sure, I’m single, I’m quite happy with it and I’m not even looking for a new partner. Well, I don’t need one, because one day he will grow up, right? Only recently I realized that I wasn’t moving on. I wasn’t going to let go of him. I still wanted it to work, because I placed so much hope in him. I came to another country for that guy and now everything is supposed to be gone? No way!

The last time we spoke about it he said that he moved on. He still seems to be single, but he seems to know now that it won’t work out with the two of us. He would be too afraid that we would have the same problems again. He moved on. And I didn’t. I still sit here thinking: “Wait a minute, we love each other, why doesn’t it work?!”

Am I immature for having hope? Am I stupid for doing what my heart tells me to do? Am I silly for still wondering why it didn’t work out? No. Everyone needs hope and doing what your heart tells you to do is probably the only way to actually find happiness out there. I would even say it is normal that I didn’t move on yet, because he was important enough for me to move to a country that I didn’t really like in the first place!

Of course I am moving on. I know that it won’t work out. I know that my hope is futile. I know that he’s not ready for what I need in a relationship. I just didn’t want to let go yet! I could let go any moment now and it would be ok. I mourned enough, I suffered enough, I reasoned enough and I certainly waited long enough. It is time to let go and I know it.

• Everyone needs time to move on and you should give yourself this time. If you just throw yourself into the next relationship you will still struggle in the same way, but you won’t do it consciously. It will be unfair and cruel for yourself and for your new partner.
• Everyone needs to suffer through a loss. Your dreams were shattered, your future ripped apart, it is normal that moving on hurts! In the end: if it doesn’t hurt, then the relationship was just a waste of your energy!
• It is normal that you don’t want to let go, because this person had such an importance in your life. Letting go sometimes feels like betrayal. If you still love this person, why would you let go just because reality caught up with you? It seems wrong.
• You will know when it’s time to let go. When you suffered enough, when you had enough time to think, when it doesn’t feel like betrayal anymore, then you will know that it’s time to let go.

For me it is time. Know when it’s time for you!

My favourite tango couple are Javier Rodriguez and Geraldine Rojas. They were truly amazing together (for more videos of them together click here). For both there came the time when they had to move on.

This tango video shows Javier Rodriguez with his new partner Andrea Misse.

The following video shows Geraldine Rojas with her new partner Ezequiel Paludi.

There were of course these like-minded characters, who all drifted into some “revoluzzer” state, they dressed differently, they talked differently and they started to read weird stuff. At some point I was so depressed that I started wearing only black. It just expressed what my feelings were at the time. Suddenly people started asking me whether I was a “goth” and whether I listened to this-and-that, goth-music. I became interested and found myself in a subculture full of depressed people, who express that they are different. They were basically judging society with the harsh eye of someone who is trying to get out of there but can’t. They created a new sense of belonging between each other rather than trying to belong “to the normal kids”.

As a teenager I was quite impressed with all that, until I realized that the subculture that tried to be so different in fact reproduced the same dynamics as the society that they were trying to escape. There were those that fit too well into this whole thing. They tried too hard and then passed judgement onto the ones who just lived a normal life as well. After a while it was also obvious that all this is quite a money-cow. You can sell these people a lot of stuff that they don’t need and they will happily buy it, because they’re in fact no different from the “normal” kids out there. They all want to belong and they would pay any price to have admiration at least for one day at some music festival. The music itself was repetitive in nature: the same stereotypes, the same feelings produced, just different voices, different settings, different people. After a while all this was old for me. And no different.

In these years I became more and more detached from what people would call the mainstream culture. I don’t listen to pop music unless it is of very high quality. I despise the mind numbing effect of radio and TV. I don’t read “novels” and I really handle media in general carefully. To be honest this is quite normal for a Media and Cultural Studies graduate, who was mainly interested in Media Critique as a starting point. I carefully use the internet as a tool rather than a place. If I had to use only one phrase to describe my relationship to mainstream culture I would describe it as “mindful awareness”. I mostly don’t take it seriously and pick out the nice bits for me.

Where does all this negativity towards mainstream culture come from? Hurt feelings! They didn’t want to play with me so now I don’t play with them. I was an angry teenager shouting: “They say I’m different? Well, true, I’m better …!” and to be honest, their judgement made me a “better” person, if you count being aware of the positives and negatives of this society as “better”. The only problem is though, that awareness doesn’t make you happy. If you spend your days and nights thinking about what’s wrong with this society, you will become a deeply negative and disappointed person. No wonder that “goths” tend to be depressive: They ask for it. They want to be depressed about the state of mainstream culture!

In fact the dynamic of being different is a vicious circle: They don’t think you belong to them, so they treat you like that. As a result of them treating you in this fashion you decide that you don’t want to belong to them. Now they get even more annoyed at you because you don’t want to belong to their little club and think that you’re better than them, so they treat you even worse! This strengthens your judgement about them being just a bunch of judgemental idiots … and so on. In the end I became someone who passed judgement on society. I judged their politics, their stupid TV programs, their mating rituals, their fashion, their music, well, their lives. I honestly didn’t like what I saw as well. It was full of group dynamics that made it almost impossible for any human being to grow into a reasonable person.

What does Big Brother and Pop Idols say about our society? I recently even found myself on a date – I really wasn’t expecting it, because it was in Germany and Germans really don’t do dates normally – I found it highly amusing that this guy was trying to impress me with absolutely ridiculous things. My “harsh” judgement is in fact realistic. Think about it: Think about TV programmes and our daily murder on TV, think about morning radio shows or the complicated dating rituals people put themselves through? Does that really seem like the product of the efforts of a highly intelligent species? No, in fact it is the point where our individual intelligence is taken over by a group intelligence that doesn’t seem as sophisticated and sharp.

Let’s take a moment and think about group dynamics: A single ant for example isn’t really intelligent – it only has a simple nervous system that is far from the sophistication of our human brains. A group of ants though can build and coordinate and do stuff that seems rather intelligent. Ants show swarm intelligence. A group needs to think about communication and coordination and there usually is a bottleneck: Messages change when they’re passed on, the media prove it every day! Our group coordination is of course more sophisticated than that of ants (they communicate solely through pheromones), but if you consider Big Brother and morning radio shows it also seems worse than how the brain coordinates its efforts. Our human swarm intelligence produces behaviour that is rather ridiculous compared to what a single rational human being can achieve.

And there we see the slippery slope that every human being has to face: The balance between individuation and culture. Humans are social beings: they go mental when they are alone and start talking to themselves. At the same time families, groups, subcultures and even nations and entire cultures produce a group behaviour that seems rather frightening to me. Just watch a Leni Riefenstahl film and you know what I mean by frightening! Animals and therefore also humans are good at copying behaviour of other animals – it’s due to the mirror neurons in our brain which, when you watch someone else doing something, let you feel as if you were doing it yourself.

I myself however tend to get panic attacks if there are too many people around me or if there is a situation involving group dynamics going on. This doesn’t always happen, but only if there is a situation going on that seems to get out of control. Pushing in concerts, escalation in tense situations, chaos, violent outbreaks, everything that is slightly out of control makes me really nervous! I sometimes keep to myself to keep the control and everything that is outside of my control and goes wrong annoys me. I tend to judge people, who spoil my experience of a situation. People who have more power and abuse it make me sick – some teachers would be a good example. I just don’t like not being in control. And there it is again, negative judgement.

To tell you the truth, this is something that I’m working on for a year now. My ex-partner drove me crazy, because he was “out of control”. He was always late for no reason, he was always broke because he didn’t budget, he sometimes had no place to stay and expected me to help him out and the worst of all: he got incredibly drunk for no reason. Having a drink, having a laugh, I don’t mind that, but drunk people scare me. They are out of control, no reasoning possible! There were times when he scared me – even though he was usually a very friendly drunk – and there were times when I was scared that something might happen to him when he’s in some sort of a state. For all this I judged him. I didn’t take him seriously when he said he would do something. I didn’t believe him, when he said that he would be on time. And I didn’t believe him that he cared. The problem was: I couldn’t stop judging him!

After half a year of not being together with him I think I understand what this was all about: In his case, I was simply out of control myself! He made me do stupid things, make stupid decisions, irrational choices and he somehow was a good reason for slacking off. I didn’t like what he brought out in me. He made me a weak girl, who moved to another country because of “some guy” who can’t even sort a room out for himself. I plainly didn’t understand why in fact I didn’t mind him being someone, who after all just didn’t give a damn about things that I took so seriously. He doesn’t care for marks and he doesn’t have to prove anything to himself. He just does his stuff and even if it doesn’t work out, he is fine. Come what may, he seems to know what he’s doing, even if he doesn’t.  The problem wasn’t that he was a mess. The problem was that I loved him anyway! The problem was that I felt stupid for being with a guy with so little aspirations for himself.

I myself am so indoctrinated with all these values of success, productivity and achievement that I couldn’t just let him be. Maybe it is even more than that. In fact I thought that I shouldn’t let him be, that I have a responsibility to “save his soul” just to save mine, to stay successful, productive and determined. There was this little voice in my head telling me that after all he’s right. Only society cares about marks, success and achievement and should I really care for this cruel, unfocused group intelligence and its judgement?

What I’m really trying to tell you here is that all these judgements, mine, his, the society’s are completely arbitrary. In fact I ceased to know whose judgement I’m passing, because now I’m actually in the middle of the society that I originally hated so passionately as a teenager. Is it my judgement that my expartner is a lazy unfocused mess? Or is it society’s judgement? Is it my judgement that society is flawed and cruel or is it just hurt feelings? Nobody knows anymore where all this negativity came from in the first place! Who threw the first stone? In the end: who cares where all these harsh judgements came from? It is time to put an end to them. It is time to step back and say “No more”!

The next time you judge someone, be it a beggar, your spouse or your prophet: Stop! Don’t judge, acknowledge! Don’t jump to conclusions, don’t judge according to some sort of criteria, be it positive or negative. You can’t even remember where these values stem from! Who are we to judge? For me this piece of advice is very hard to go through, but I’ve made great progress in the last half a year. I’m still a long way from being someone who takes people as they are. I’m very good at accepting people who are different from society’s standards, but it’s very hard for me to accept what people call “normal behaviour”. Normal is “what is the norm” by definition. The norm is stealing, lying, laziness, abusive behaviour, sex tourism, drugs, spam, materialistic values and … judgemental, you see? Who am I to judge society?

I can only offer my help to whoever is in need.

The last half a year the answer to this question seemed to me like the Holy Grail. Maybe I thought that I could turn everything around, if I just knew why this was happening to us. Every little bit of insight that came to me this way or another, was carefully pieced together, but I couldn’t help but feel that all this was just a way too big jigsaw puzzle, where someone threw away the most important bits. Those bits that held the whole thing together and actually gave it a certain sense seemed to evade me. Yesterday suddenly everything started to make sense. All the bits and pieces fell together and formed a fairly coherent picture of the situation. I finally knew why! I knew exactly why everything went wrong, exactly where the both of us made our mistakes and exactly how all this brought us into this situation.

Psychologically the reasons for our complete failure to not drive each other nuts is not a trivial matter. It involves a complex set of circumstances and two quite complicated characters. One of these characters behaved to be honest quite accurately as predicted, but for absolutely absurd reasons (that would be me). The other character admits to be slightly impaired in the ability to let people close in general and therefore behaved rather irrational as well. I asked myself: “So what do you make of all of this? None of this behaviour makes any sense.” A long time to think finally brought me to some very interesting insights on my part in this whole story. He already told me why he behaved the way he did and it made perfect sense to me, but my part in all this seemed rather weird, rather … not like me at all and it didn’t fit to what I wanted from this entire situation in the first place. I just couldn’t quite understand myself anymore.

It was certainly a moment of insight yesterday when all the pieces started to fit together and I had to realize why the whole situation had just gone out of control. Nothing could have prevented it, whatever my decisions would have been, it still would have happened. The reason was obvious and there was nothing I could do about it, nothing I could say or do to make everything right again and no this insight didn’t have any potential to rescue anything, it was more of a final nail in the coffin of my hope – dramatically speaking.

What do you do if you suddenly find yourself in a dead-end situation, where there’s not even anyone to blame? I mean this utter sense of helplessness when a higher power strikes and this year’s harvest is gone. Maybe the sense of some childhood trauma, which keeps nagging at you and you can’t change the cause, because it lies years and years in the past. The sense of a global economical crisis that makes you lose your house. Maybe even a sudden loss of a relative due to an unfortunate accident. What if you know the reason and there’s just absolutely nothing you or anyone else could have done to prevent what has happened to you?

Let’s look at an example in a little more detail to show different levels of a situation where reasons seem important: Let’s talk about abuse in childhood. Assume it has happened to you and you don’t even know that this is the reason for your problems, you don’t even remember that it ever happened to you. You might have depressions, dysfunctional relationships, or an awkward sense of fear in certain situations and let’s spell it out again: you don’t know the reason. For years you think: “ Why do I have depressions and why do I always end up with the wrong guys?”

Well, that’s a situation where you feel helpless, because you just don’t understand why things go wrong. You won’t be able to change anything about your situation, because you don’t even know what’s wrong with you. This makes it obvious that in a lot of cases you first have to find out the reasons for a situation, before you can go ahead and change something. Of course you can ease your immediate loneliness with just another relationship, but it might just fail as well, if you don’t figure out what went wrong the last time. If you have psychological problems and don’t know the reason for them, it might be a good idea to go into counselling for a while to find out where these problems come from!

Now, let’s look at the next step from here: What if you know that the reason for your awkward fears and your depressions actually IS that you were abused in your childhood? There is nothing you can do about it now, is there? OK, it is a situation where you surely can blame someone for what has happened to you, but terrible enough that won’t change anything, will it? You are stuck with your past and the only thing you can do with it is deal with it, right? OK, stop! Did you notice the gap between having a problem and actually dealing with it? The big question is: How? Of course, if you have deep psychological problems or a situation that has to do with loss, it might be worth considering that there are professionals around who can surely help you much more than a self-development article! However deep your problem is though, your biggest problem lies not in finding out the reasons for your situation or actually trying to turn things around, no: Your biggest problem and your worst enemy lies in the sense of helplessness!

What do I mean by that?

Remember my last relationship and that there are reasons why I can’t change anything about it and why it would have happened whatever I had done? Doesn’t that quite literally mean that I actually can’t do anything about it? No. Of course I can’t make my relationship work just like that and I can’t change the decisions I made. Of course I can’t get him back and even if I could it would never be the same again. This doesn’t mean though that I’m actually helpless! There is actually an awful lot I could do: If everything is over and lost anyway and I finally accepted to see it, it would be the perfect chance to move on, wouldn’t it? Or I could actually tell him about my reasoning and see if he agrees. I could try and change all these unfortunate circumstances or even my own mindset. Once you see that there is nothing that actually prevents you from trying to change something, it becomes actually quite easy to go ahead and do it. Even though it might not actually change anything about the situation at hand, it will change something in you or in someone else and you will eventually get the chance to move on beyond this dead-end situation. Dead end? Well then turn back and take another way!

I’m not saying that dealing with these situations is easy. I’m also not saying that you should go out there and just find someone else or forget about the problem at hand. I’m saying that there is always something you can do! You can try and move on; you can go start another business; you can go see a psychiatrist if you need a professional’s advice on how to get through situations like these and if nothing else might seem a possible solution, you could even find back to your faith to help you over a difficult patch! Nothing stops you from taking active responsibility for your own life.

In this sense identifying a situation as a problem is only half the story: It is your choice how you write the other half. One thing is clear though – a story without a proper ending shouldn’t be your final destination!