When love fails us

I put my boyfriend's picture in my drawer and locked it. threw the key to the sea. it has been one and half year, but never get simpler as the time goes. I still feel annoyed, miserable, puzzle and so much in pain. and when I know, he moves on, I questioning my ability to love someone and being loved. life is so strange, how could you like someone so deeply and find yourself painfully bleeding due to love .

I give you these ideas, on the anniversary of my separation, with the vacations coming. But before you start, please know this is not a tale of my previous wife and I. Take it as it is; a tale of autism and weakness at a time of year things often go wrong.

Lies, evasions, and half truths. All are deceits. Yesterday's white lie, once discovered, reveals the big one from the month before. That's the problem with lies. When you unravel one, there is always another behind. It's a ball of string that leads to the darkest recesses of the mind .

It's easy to demand honesty, to hold the other person to a high standard. It's hard to deliver, though, and harder still to know if we receive the truth in our most intimate exchanges. So often, love and hope blinds to what's obvious, when seen from a distance.

After all, what are those demands but another form of conditional love. Do this, and I'll love you. And the implied threat, Don't do this, and I withhold my love for you. There is also the thought that it takes a cheater to know a cheat; one must wonder from whence the demands for honesty and integrity arise. In hindsight, it would have been wise to question.

Our understanding of others is based on observation and interpretation. Revisited in the hard light of freshly discovered deception, everything changes. Was it innocent, or was it planned?

Relationships end, and we don't really know why. A few months later, the truth emerges, in a few casual words. There were the phone calls, those unexplained days, and those fights that made no sense, suddenly, everything look different. It feels wrong. Did those things really happen, or was it all in the mind? When one fact proves real, other evidence is harder to ignore. Hope gets replaced by resignation. And so the mind begins its tortured journey.

What seemed sweet and sad immediately turns shabby and tawdry. Sympathy turns to cold rage, as the realization of what's really happened sinks in. All of a sudden, the magic of the precious days before is shattered, never to seem beautiful again. Was her sweet smile real, or was it just a pretty lure, reeling him in?

Logic tells us it started out real. Love grows, and goes astray. Life intrudes. Other options appear. At some point, what was real became false. And looking back, we cannot know the precise time and place that it all went wrong.

The optimist says it was beautiful, until the very last day.

The pessimist says he was played for a fool, right from the start.

The realization sinks in that it's really over. Some would put her photo in the drawer. Others would cast it in the trash. In the end, everyone moves on. But for some, the pain lingers for a lifetime.

That's the terrible curse of autism, when love goes wrong. We lack the defenses others have evolved; our hearts are easily broken and hard to repair. We perseverate, and ugly thoughts circle in our mind, slicing jagged tears in the soul with every gyration. We lack expression, so the feelings stay locked inside, eating us alive. And worst of all, we lack the ability to sense positive energy from others, to rebuild our psyche. Breaks are the start of a hard, hard time. For some, it's a path to alcohol or depression. For others, it's a door to suicide.

I wish it wasn't so, having stood in those doorways myself.

Autistic people are particularly vulnerable to deceptions of the heart. Sadly, we often bring them on ourselves, through a mix of hope and blindness. We cannot tell what the other person intends, because that's the nature of social blindness. We're drawn to the smile, when another might have seen the phony. We stay when we should run, because we fear we're disabled, and love may never come again. For so many reasons, we are vulnerable.

It would be easy to blame predatory people. More and more, that's the American way. Blame someone or something else; something beyond our control. Many would seize that argument. I don't believe that.

I agree most of the people are not bad, but life gives them different options. Sometimes the ways they select are not the finest, just like we except otherwise, we can’t manage where another life leads. At times, all the highways hurt.

I've had a heavy heart for a very long time since I felt my relationship was finish. It's really difficult coping and facing the new reality. Life's challenging me for a second time. But I won't give up on Love. It's the most fantastic feeling.