About a week ago I came across a screenshot of a Twitter thread where a woman was expressing her heartbreak to her followers. She painfully detailed how they had been pillow talking with her boyfriend one day when he asked her how many men she’d been with before him. It was pillow talk, what could possibly go wrong? She chose honesty and told her curious boyfriend that she had been with 30 men. The guy brushed it off and claimed to be okay, but the lady noticed that he became distant and cold towards her in the days that followed. This scenario prompted me to ask myself some questions, the first being, “How honest is too honest?”
For most of my life, I have lived with a false sense of belief that I was capable of handling the truth no matter how devastatingly painful it was but as I continue to become more aware, I know better than to ask questions I don’t want the answers to. I value honesty but keep some stuff to yourself because I guarantee to judge the hell out of you. That’s just me.
How far away is the past? I would argue that for most of us, the past is not that far away as we tend to obsess about things that have long past. If we are capable of beating ourselves up for things we did decades ago, who is to say how we will react to things our partners did a year ago before we started dating?
Granted, there are some really assertive people out there who can ask for the truth and handle it well. What I am saying here is that just because your neighbour can execute a perfect split without giving themselves a muscle pull, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can do it too. Know yourself, understand your limits.
Curiosity killed the cat, like the moth that was so intrigued by the candle that it flew too close to the flame and ended up getting roasted. It is natural to want to know intimate details about your partner but don’t get too carried away by the rush of wanting to dig unnecessarily deep into their past undertakings if you know that you will later hold it against them. Protect your peace and try to know them based on the things that you can see there and then.
One of my closest friends who shall remain unnamed once got too comfortable in her relationship and forgot all about her inability to get past the past. She got too interested in her man’s romantic past and discovered that he had relations with her former boss five years prior. The man swore that it had been a brief romance that had since ended and even offered proof that no communication existed between the two anymore. My friend was confused and so blinded by her insecurities that she couldn’t get the image of her man and her former boss out of her mind. It was all she could think about when she saw him or her former boss.
The relationship would inevitably get strained beyond its limits as my friend was obsessed with digging even more into his past to find out who else had been on the hit list. You might argue that she has some issues that she needs to work on but if most of us were truthful, we would have also spiralled down the same way.
Who knows if the guy had changed, and he was truly committed to her? None of it would have mattered because a narrative had already been set in her mind. One that couldn’t be changed no matter what proof was brought forth.
Know yourself and understand your limits. Don’t dig too much into their lives if you know you will immediately start resenting them and seeing them in an unflattering light. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.
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