There Is No Room For Me in Your Heart

Love isn’t pie — finite, and the more people who come to the table, the smaller your slice will be. Love is pi — infinite and irrational.

Right?

Being on a dating moratorium in order to process three straight years of brutal heartbreaks has been proving more difficult than expected. I’ve lost my safety net of “just browsing profiles” on OKCupid. But I know I had to do that. “Just browsing profiles” lead to chasing new love interests and ignoring red flags — all in an effort to avoid the pain of previous lovers.

And one of the things I find myself facing head on, now, is the realization that there was no room for me in many lovers’ hearts.

Quite possibly the biggest issue I had to deal with, while I was more active in my dating life, was feeling like my partners were too focused on another partner to really pay me any mind.

This usually came in the form of a “primary”, and typically a primary who found my very existence to be a threat. Through big and small actions — from as innocuous as interrupting our time together to text their primary, to as insidious as canceling our dates because the primary wanted a date on that day instead (or cutting a date short because the primary was upset about the date)— I was told that they could only love me as far as it didn’t inconvenience their primaries.

I’ve had partners break things off with me so they could focus on their relationship with their primary. I’ve had partners relegate me to quick dates during office hours (because then their primary didn’t have to have the discomfort of knowing their partner was on a date). I even had a partner who wanted to put a moratorium on us having sex while he and his now-ex-girlfriend “figured things out” in their transition to becoming friends, all because she told him she wanted him to not have sex with me.

And I put up with it. I know where it comes from: I had a childhood that, among other things, taught me to be backburnered in favor of the more volatile, more “important” people in the room. I was told from before I had cognitive memories that the only space that can be for me is the space that is left over.

When I try to process the heartbreak, this is my biggest roadblock: reconciling that there was no space for me in their hearts — not really, not truly. They claimed to be open to multiple loving relationships, but they didn’t actually love me. The weight I feel when I remember how much I was disregarded in favor of someone else feels unbearable sometimes.

But this is why I’m on a dating break. This is why I’m reassessing my dealbreakers and making sure I can be in a place where a dealbreaker doesn’t silently morph into, “I can deal with this.” This is why I’m building myself up so I don’t crumble when a relationship is giving me crumbs.

Because this is exactly one thing you can do when someone has proven that there is no space for you in their hearts: wish them well with those who are actually in their hearts, and find the nearest exit.