I was going into my first year of college and life was looking like it was just beginning. It felt like God was directing me in the perfect path. Having the guts to become a designer, having a close group of girl friends and having my first ever relationship. To someone who has always been an optimist everyone and everything around me seemed amazingly perfect.
He had heard about me through his friends, they were telling him how good we would be together, so he wanted to come see me in person. That day we met, I was anxious, felt like something big was going to happen..and it did. We talked for about a hour over lunch and exchanged snapchats.
After a few days we went on our first date. For some reason from that day on I wanted him to be the one, I wanted the relationship to workout. I mean why shouldn’t it, we had so many things in common.
Having never gone through talking to a boy for more than 10 minutes up until I met him, I thought things were really taking off. A few months later, after we had become official, I started feeling anxious. I started to get thoughts that were painful. It took a huge toll on me mentally. We were together for about 10 months, and 6 of those were months that I was always sad on the inside. Everything about the relationship felt wrong, and yet, I couldn’t bring myself to even think about ending it.
Being a Muslim girl who has had certain strong values her whole life, I never thought I would be the type of girl who would be in a relationship like that. After the relationship came to an end, I thought why, why did I do that to myself?How could I go against my strong values like that?
Looking back at how everything unfolded, I can see that my strong values were not so strong after all.
– The friend group around me pushed me to do things that fit the “social norms” and that was switching how I was behaving.
– I was putting what society expected of a relationship in-front of what I knew what was right and wrong in a relationship
– I trusted everyone around me, even though their intentions were never in the right place for me
– I was lying to my parents
– I was putting myself in so much pain for something that went against everything I believed in
I was really upset with myself. And I thought that nothing good came out of that experience. But after taking a few moments to sit down and list the pros and cons of what that relationship brought to me. I thought everything that I was going to spill out was going to be negative but everything that came out was truly positive.
That relationship taught me:
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Never rush anything!
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It takes so much work to make a relationship work.My P.O.V up until that relationship was always me thinking that you will find your soulmate and that is it. But it takes time, energy and commitment to really have something work.
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It also takes the right person to build a relationship with and if they aren’t nothing you do can make them the “right person”.
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My values should never be changed because society expects me to.
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My relationship with God was not as strong as it is right now.
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I learned to not trust someone right away, they have to earn the right to truly get to known me.
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Internal peace should never be compromised for anything because it is truly too expensive.
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It allowed me to know what I want in a man and in a relationship in general.
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It allowed me to be able to, for the first time ever, open up to my parents about relationships.
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Lastly, to trust my GUT! It knows before anything else.
Throughout the relationship, I always felt like it was never right. Going through the mental struggles of trying to tell myself that I should not stop the relationship allowed the lesson from this experience to resonate with me like nothing I’ve experienced before. If I didn’t go through this experience I would’ve settled my whole life, because that’s what I was doing in this relationship. I would’ve never understood the meaning of a true authentic relationship and how much work they need. My values are now backed up by lessons and experiences which allows me to meaningfully say my values are stronger than ever. Even though I was putting myself down for having made the mistake of going into the relationship in the first place, now I know I wouldn’t have grown and learned so much if it wasn’t for it. And for that I’m saying thank you, next.