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.

When I was living in East Germany I surely treated my life with as much respect as my morning toast. Every day passed by in a hurry and I was killing time by watching TV, surfing the internet and instant messaging with other people. I spent a lot of my time with just basically nothing, because I just didn’t know what I really wanted. Of course I was often depressed, because my life had no purpose and seemed irrelevant and dull. I blamed it on school and that it could give me no real purpose – it seemed just a waste of my time -, but in fact I was the person who couldn’t give me real purpose. I think most of my time my relationships had to hold as a substitute for purpose back then. A person with a dull and irrelevant life, who is depressed most of the time is no good partner though, which meant that my relationships weren’t really stable. I drifted from depressed-because-I-had-no-purpose to depressed-because-I-felt-lonely and back again. I wasn’t a happy person back then.

When I moved out of my mother’s flat and to West Germany – I was about 17 – I had no fast internet connection and also no TV. This was actually quite refreshing and I started reading a lot. I still had no purpose though, but the more I grew the more stable my relationship attempts became, until I met someone, who was really stable and who stayed with me for 4 years. He was a teacher at my school and as immoral as it seems from his side, he was not to blame at all. I was really after him and we stayed together for a long time, considering that it was a time of change. Only a couple of years after we got together I realized that he couldn’t give me purpose. He didn’t understand it at the time, because he thought he wasn’t enough for me. To be honest I also completely failed to explain what was happening to me and we broke up for a while. Only when I had found a way back to hope we got back together. In retrospect I lost him, because I didn’t have a purpose when I met him. Do you define yourself over the relationship you have?

It still took another few years, a completely screwed up relationship and a burn-out syndrome after that for me to understand the value of purpose: If you don’t have a purpose in your life, you will work for other people’s goals. You will receive your purpose from your spouse, your boss, your religion or from the media.

If you want to have your spouse or your religion as your purpose, that’s fine to me, I’m no-one to judge, but it might be interesting for you to know that your own purpose won’t necessarily be an awful lot different from the one you receive from your religion or spouse! The difference is that you will feel much more in control and much more one with your purpose if you consciously choose it! Let’s say your goal is to serve god, because that’s what you have been taught your entire life – your religion defines your purpose then. What if you consciously choose to make serving god your purpose in life? It doesn’t really change your purpose content-wise, but it certainly does change your relationship towards your purpose! Won’t you be a much better servant, if you really want to be one?

As could be seen in the fallen socialist societies of the East external purpose isn’t the same as your own purpose – it is similar what happens to communal belongings: they receive much less respect than your own, because you didn’t choose to have them. You mostly don’t even consciously realize that you paid for those belongings as well with your taxes! The same happens with purpose – mostly people don’t really realize that their purpose is set by advertisement and presidential speeches, because they don’t pay attention. Suddenly their purpose is getting money to buy crap that they don’t need and suddenly people approve of war against terrorism “because it’s a good cause”, but wait a minute where did that come from actually and what is the secret agenda of those people who planted the seed of this idea in your head? Do you really want to work for other people’s secret agendas? Do you want your son to die for a secret agenda?

Having your own purpose will make you do what needs to be done much more easily. I often feel the impact of this when talking to other students: if the reason for studying is that you need a degree badly and that you need it to get a good well-paid job to become wealthy and successful, your purpose is external: society forces you to get a degree in order to get a good job. Society also planted the purpose “becoming wealthy and successful” in your mind through media and indoctrination. I don’t necessarily say it’s a bad purpose (even though it’s definitely not a good one in my opinion), I just say it’s another external purpose that in fact means nothing to you in reality. With purposes like these you won’t be happy for achieving your goal of getting a degree, because the degree is only one step to yet another goal – becoming wealthy and successful. Once you become wealthy and successful you will be happy though, right? No, wrong! You will realize that becoming wealthy and successful wasn’t really what you wanted after all – people paraphrase that with “money isn’t everything”, right?

What if you set being wealthy and successful as your own purpose by conscious choice? Well, that doesn’t change the content of your purpose, remember? The purpose isn’t “better” or “worse” just because it is your own, so even if you choose that, it might be a really shallow purpose that doesn’t make you happy after all! You will just work harder to live your life according to your purpose if you consciously choose it. Don’t only choose your purpose: Choose it wisely as well!

What is a good purpose then and how do you choose it? Well, “good” and “bad” are rather subjective categories – even though we might have common opinions in society which stem from our cultural heritage. There is vast philosophical literature on “good and evil” and there we find a rather detached analysis of the matter at hand. To mention only one example which is reflected in the philosophical discussion: We in our Western society consider killing old people when they can’t take care of themselves as pretty evil, while Inuits at least in the past considered it as a fair practice to save their elderly from starvation and pain (even though assisted suicide was much more common – for more on the subject in an easily understandable matter read this). Good and evil aren’t as universal as we think and are mostly cultural constructs. Nevertheless they are pretty universal within the same culture and that’s what matters if you think about how to live your life in our Western society, right? Therefore remember your own cultural heritage when you choose a purpose – to rob and kill as many people as possible would certainly be a bad purpose!

Apart from the universal aspects of your purpose deciding on a good one is mainly a matter of your own beliefs and opinions – e.g. if you want to become wealthy to help people who are not, it reflects your own personal opinion that helping poor people is good. Does a good purpose have to be altruistic? Does an egoistic purpose make you a bad person? No, certainly not. If you want to know how egoism can contribute to the greater good, please refer to Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, which provides a very interesting perspective on the topic. Your purpose should reflect your own personality and not what you think you should find right and good. If your purpose is something which you think you should do, then it certainly comes from some kind of indoctrination again and it won’t be your own!

Interestingly enough I uncovered another layer of reflection that seems to be connected with finding your own purpose: Finding out who you actually are! This also draws upon the value of realistic evaluation that I gave a lot of thought in this post. If you now think that becoming who you really want to be is rather circular business, then you’re very right and it’s not a bad thing. It means that on your way to becoming who you want to be you will learn a lot of useful skills that will help you in a lot of different aspects of the process and maybe with other situations in your life as well!

Read selfdev. to find out who you actually are and how to choose a purpose for your life on that basis.

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!