There is a funny thing about convincing yourself to live a half truth. The whole truth always manages to bitch slap you at a moment when you stop paying attention. The sting of reality is your wake up call. Its message clear: “what the hell were you thinking?” You can never sell yourself short and expect to come through completely unscathed. If you have a shred of self preservation, then you will eventually see that you are slowly killing yourself, starving yourself of what you richly deserve and that you are becoming like the multitudes of humans who sleepwalk through their lives never really living and that you despise those people more than are willing to accept this deceit.

You wonder why I’ve come to such a jolting piece of reality. Well, I’ve had my own encounter with love’s last hurrah. A tumultuous relationship that was on again, off again finally closed its final chapter. My final wake up call came when I went to a party with my then girlfriend and I was introduced as just a friend. I knew it would happen. I just didn’t expect for it to feel like such a betrayal. I expected to be less than honest to these strangers about the true nature of my relationship. I didn’t expect it to cause me to feel anger, to feel rage, to feel like I should somehow be ashamed.

So I stood in a room full of strangers watching a woman who looked much like someone I knew intimately, smiling coyly at the men who approached her, laughing at things I could not hear, using body language that only moments ago was reserved for me and me alone. One moment I caught myself thinking, “Wow, she’s so beautiful” and the next thought was “who is this person?”

Things only proceeded to get worse as the alcohol flowed on into the night causing tempers to rise and inhibitions to lower. Thoughts of all things unholy began to enter my mind – cheating, lying, betrayal, fear, anger and complete devastation. I began to realize that maybe this isn’t the kind of relationship that I want to be in. I mean who wants to be invisible to someone that you love and adore depending on the situation. If you can act like you don’t love someone, well, then you probably don’t love that person to begin with.

Now I may sound harsh, like a whining child throwing a tantrum. And in some ways I am. I freely admit that when it comes to being hurt in any situation I can show the most cowardly of human characteristics….jealously, rage, anger, selfishness, revenge. And I wrestle with those feelings like any person does. Sometimes I win, sometimes I show my ass. But I always try to do the right thing as I see it. How you see it or how anyone else sees it doesn’t play into my decision making process. It’s only from my point of view that I have the luxury of playing my hand.

So what do you do when love has had its last hurrah? And it’s not that I don’t love her anymore because that is far from the truth. I do and fear that I always will. But I want more from a relationship than what I’m getting. I want a partner. Someone that I can share my life with in equal portions, someone who is my equal in every way, someone who shares my burdens as well as my triumphs. I want someone who will wrap their arms around me at night whether we’ve laughed or cried and still say that they love me. I want to see love in their eyes no matter who’s around.