Relationship Advice. Seriously?

The irony never ceases to amaze me. People, coming to me, for relationship advice. I mean seriously, does track record mean nothing? But perhaps failure makes you better able to understand a subject, in a bizarre offshoot of practice makes perfect. Perhaps, in the years to come, I'll stop repeating mistakes, and make some new ones. Ah, well, there's always hope.

In my enforced state of solitary -not like there are hordes of eligible guys beating at my door, but anyway – I'm able to be more objective about the past. I may be in love, and still hoping, but I'm okay with that. It's taken me three long months to be able to approach a day without dread, but I'm getting there, I'm getting there. Having the status of been there done that though, makes it easy to spot the mistakes that people around me make, while they're making them. It's the age old conflict between head and heart, and until you reach the outpost that is jaded, you're likely to choose heart over and over, while your head watches, in gloom.

I sometimes find it hard to understand why reason and logic and sense, take a vacation when you're in a relationship. Why otherwise strong men and women are reduced to tears, to doing all the things that you ordinarily look at with disdain and scorn. But I've been there myself, at both ends. I don't understand it though, which means what?

I do get the bit that dictates who you become, from who you were. The way I see it, you can go through cynical and bitter and choose to stay there, or you can take cynical and bitter in your stride, and move on to philosophical. I hope I've evolved even half that much. Does it mean I'm becoming a better human being if I'm able to not get angry at what happened? If I still feel deep degrees of something close to heartfelt emotion, when if I were to be objective, or an outsider, I'd say get mad, maybe even get even and move on?

Or does it mean that I'm just a very sad person?

I will say this though – it makes me understand better the emotion that stops someone from behaving with a rationale of sense and intelligence, when reason takes a hike, and sense takes a snooze.

It's a bit of a bitch, that emotion. It's the same one that brings up memories of happier times, when you're trying hard to wrap your head around a break up.

It's the one that hits you between the eyes and takes control of your mind, making you dial the number, make the call, and make a fool of yourself in the process.

And it's the one that deludes you into thinking of how things could have been, when they can't any more.

So yes, I have sympathy when I listen to the emotions that mess up a mind. It's the sympathy of understanding.