Overcoming Unhappiness

I was talking to myself in the car again today. I find myself doing this more and more, trying to overcome this pervading sense of failure that I have felt since the breakup. There is sadness that I am dealing with, but when I really think about it, there is mostly a sense of failure.

I talk to myself to convince myself I have not failed; I am not a failure in relationships. I went over the past three relationships and when I look at them clearly, taking out this filter of failure that I use to view anything in my life that does not go as I expect it to, I come down to something that has less to do with me and much, much more to do with them.

All three men were unhappy. They sometimes said it, but mostly they expressed it through how they talked about their lives, as if their own lives were failures. I don't believe that they were failures, but I do see that they were unhappy. Even the way they carried themselves – eyes generally downcast, shoulders slumped – just told the world they were unhappy.

Each had left someone because they were unhappy, and each told me they were so happy to have found me. Each thought I was the answer to their prayers, the person who make their lives worth living. And each left me when they discovered at some point they were no longer happy.

Now there is only so much I am capable of, and one thing I cannot do is be responsible for someone else's happiness (although I think, deep inside, I have felt that I could; that I could fix these poor souls somehow. That I could make them happy.)

But it is an impossible task that I am forever trying to take on. I look at my last relationship as a perfect example. According to what he told me, he was unhappy with his wife, so he left her. He was unhappy with the girl he met after that, so he left her. He was unhappy with me, so he left me. Who knows who else he has been with since then, but, I am betting he has or will leave them after feeling he is unhappy with them. Beyond that, he does not have a happy relationship with his mother or his sister, and even his daughter does not seem to be the happiest person, either. We have a world of unhappiness here that has gone on since before I met him, and will, most probably, continue on, until he chooses to look inside to see what makes him most unhappy.

So why do I, or did I feel that this was my problem? I have my own stuff to deal with, and I am dealing with it as I go along. But this is not my stuff. I did not make him unhappy, and I could not make him happy. That was another case of my trying to fix something that is beyond my scope.

Now that I am working on myself, I have a better idea of what I need to do. If I get into a relationship, I hope it is not one that I jump into trying to fix someone's past so they can be happy. However, if I do end up in with someone like this, I will hope to know that I am not responsible for their happiness. That is their journey. I have my own.