When I was a Simp in a Land far Away.

There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody here is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be in unhappiness but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you do things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.

My first girlfriend dumped me in spectacular fashion, it is still painful to-date. She was cheating on me with my teacher. I was in form one and she was in form three- 2 classes ahead of me. It was awesome. And by awesome, I mean it felt like getting punched in the stomach about 253 times. To make things worse, when I confronted her about it, she promptly left me for him. One year together, down the toilet just like that. I was miserable for months afterward. That was to be expected. But I also held her responsible for my misery. Which, take it from me, didn’t get me very far. It just made the misery worse.

See, I couldn’t control her. No matter how many times I called her, or screamed at her, or begged her to take me back, or made surprise visits to her place, or did other creepy and irrational ex-boyfriend things, I could never control her emotions or er actions. Ultimately, while she was to blame for how I felt, she was never responsible for how I felt. I was.

At some point, after enough tears (I would have taken booze but I was still a student), my thinking began to shift and I began to understand that although she had done something horrible to me and she be blamed for that, it was now my own responsibility to make myself happy again. She was never going to pop up and fix things for me. I had to fix them myself.

When I took that approach, a few things happened. First, I began to improve myself. I started exercising and spending more time with my friends (whom I had been neglecting). I started deliberately meeting new people-started dating a new girl right away. I took a big study-trip of course I was just in the same school but busy in my class, glancing at my new girlfriend and did some volunteer work. And slowly, I started to feel better.

I still resented my ex for what she had done. But at least now I was taking responsibility for my own emotions. And by doing so, I was choosing better values-values aimed at taking care of myself. Learning to feel better about myself, rather than aimed at getting her to fix what she’d broken.

(By the way, this whole ‘holding her responsible for my emotions” thing is probably part of why she left in the first place. I was a simp, Kibe Andrew calls them “Kinuthia’s”). The new relationship too didn’t work. I was young and stupid, repeated the same mistake over and over.

Then, about a year later, something funny began to happen. As I looked back on our relationship, I started to notice problems I had never noticed before, problems that I was to blame for and that I could have done something to solve. I realized that it was likely that I hadn’t been a great boyfriend, and that people don’t just magically cheat on somebody they’ve been with unless they are unhappy for some reason.

I’m not saying that this excused what my ex did-not at all. But recognizing my mistakes helped me realize that I perhaps hadn’t been the innocent victim I’d believed myself to be. That I had a role to play in enabling the shitty values for that long, what did that say about me and my values? I learned the hard way that if people in your relationships are selfish and doing hurtful things, it’s likely you are too, you just don’t realize it.

In hindsight, I was able to look back and see warning signs of my ex-girlfriend’s character, signs I had chosen to ignore or brush off when I was with her. That was my fault. I could look back and see that I hadn’t exactly been the Boyfriend of the year to her either. In fact, I had often been cold and arrogant toward her; other times I took her for granted and blew her off and hurt her. These things were my fault too.

I wonder how I had no appreciation for nice food (if you know… you know). I must be a sucker at it.

Did my mistakes justify her mistake? No. But still, I took on the responsibility of never making those same mistakes again, and never overlooking the same signs again, to help guarantee that I will never suffer the same consequences again. I took on the responsibility of striving to make my future relationships with women that much better. And I’m happy to report that I have. No more cheating girlfriends leaving me, no more 253 stomach punches. I took responsibility for my problems and improved upon them. I took responsibility for my role in that unhealthy relationship and improved upon it with later relationships.