One of the things that really gets to me about Tumblr fandom’s view of relationships is the idea (sometimes stated outright, often implied) that there’s some kind of clear dividing line between healthy and not-healthy, between abusive and not-abusive, that people never slide back and forth between those things or slip over the line, and that’s just … not how human relationships work. And it’s one thing when you’re holding fictional characters to an absurdly high standard, but it makes me worry that a lot of people are internalizing the idea that human relationships aren’t messy and complicated and sometimes painful, and that’s really going to make life hard for you. You’ll either end up beating yourself up way too much for doing utterly normal things, or beating up on other people for doing utterly normal things, and you’ll let a lot of things that could have been good slip through your fingers because they aren’t perfect.
Look, I’m not saying anybody should stay in a relationship that’s toxic for them, and ideally we should all be in happy supportive relationships with people who make us happy all the time, but human emotions are a mess.
You WILL do terrible, awful things. You’ll be selfish. You’ll hurt people. Sometimes they’ll forgive you and sometimes they won’t. Every long-term relationship you have will end up being littered with the memories of times you were both awful to each other.
You’ll fall in love with people who don’t love you, and be loved by people you don’t love. Sometimes you might try to make a relationship (or a friendship) work anyway. Sometimes it’ll even work out.
You’ll end up loving some people you never in a million years thought you’d feel that way about, because you got a terrible first impression and misjudged them. You’ll look back and think, How could I not have known how awesome they were? But you didn’t, then. And you’ll walk away from other people who could have been just as beloved and never know it.
A lot of times you won’t be able to tell how other people feel about you at all, and you’ll just have to keep going anyway.
You’ll break up friendships by doing stupid, selfish things.
You’ll put your trust in the wrong people, and the wrong places, and have it broken.
You’ll do some things thinking you’re the good guy at the time, and realize in retrospect that you weren’t.
You’ll change your mind about a lot of stuff. You’ll realize that some of the things you used to believe were kind of messed up. Sometimes you’ll change your mind because of people around you and then realize that you were right all along. Sometimes you’ll realize that nobody’s right or wrong, but have to make a decision anyway.
You’ll interfere where you shouldn’t and get your ass handed to you. You’ll fail to interfere where you should have, and feel guilty for the rest of your life.
(Not everyone will do all of these things. But it’s humanly impossible not to do at least some of them.)
And none of that makes you an awful person or undeserving of love or bad to be around?! It’s just how people are. It’s how EVERYONE is, even the ones who seem like they have it together. Life is messy and complicated and confusing, and it hurts. People can do awful things and be forgiven. In fact, if that weren’t true, none of us would have any relationships at all.
I don’t know, I’m just thinking about this today, because expecting perfection of fictional characters is one thing (they’re fictional, it doesn’t hurt them) but it’s going to mess you up in all kinds of ways if you think that’s actually how real life works.
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