I watched a particularly intense episode of 90210 this morning. Spoiler alert – it was episode 23 from back in season four. If you don’t watch the show, don’t worry. I can explain what was going down fairly succinctly: Naomi fell head-over-Louboutin-heels for a rich dude going by the name of PJ. In the space of three or four days, they got engaged. Then she discovered he was only in a rush to get married because otherwise he would lose his trust fund (that bastard). Props to Naomi, she walked away. But it hit her hard. At one point she throws her perfectly manicured hands up in the air and declares that love doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It’s all fake.
I know how she felt in that moment. The same thought has dominated my head and my heart for most of the past year.
Yet, though I felt blindsided and Catfished and a number of other horrible things by my ex, I could see what looked like love all around me. In my friends’ relationships. In my parents’ relationship. In my sister’s. In the guys I work with shopping painstakingly for the perfect birthday gifts for their wives and girlfriends. Not to mention all those little gems of love that we all witness every day – couples holding each other close as they walk home, or kissing each other goodbye at the bus stop in the morning.
For a long time I believed that all those relationships were fake too.
I felt quite smug about it. I knew better than these stupid, happy morons. Love is, after all, just a big fat pack of lies fed to us by that damn double H of manipulation (Hollywood and Hallmark).
Now that the mist of sadness is finally clearing, and my hope for the future is starting to kick in, I can see things differently.
Yes, what I had was fake. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but I have accepted it even if it still feels like it’s stuck in my throat and possibly going to choke me to death. If what he told me in the end is true, then everything that my ex told me up to that point was bullsh**. Like lines he had memorised. The things you are supposed to say when you’re in love. It boils down to this: every time that he told me he loved me, he didn’t. Thump. That’s a punch to the stomach of disappointment wrapped in humiliation.
But, yes, I’m no longer ashamed to say it. What I had was fake.
That doesn’t, however, mean that all relationships are.
In fact, I’m starting to think it’s much like shopping for a designer handbag. If you know what you’re looking for, you can spot the difference between a Mulberry and a fake. Sometimes it might be glaringly obvious. But sometimes it might look, feel and even smell like a Mulberry. However, the trained eye will know to look for that particular stitch on the lining, or the letter that can be found under the ‘Made in’ label on the inside. The trained eye knows a fake, and knows when it has found the real thing. Because the trained eye has seen the good, the bad, and the heinously ugly before. It’s a question of experience.
Experience is something I now have.
I’ve learned from the pizza of doom. I’ve learned to recognise the warning signs. I’ve learned that if something feels too good to be true, then it probably is. And while it had the potential to turn me into a cynical old hag who shies away from others and festers away eating meals for one and bitching about the price of them, it didn’t. Because I’m using what I’ve learned to train my heart. Which means it was a worthwhile experience, if only because it was an education.
I’m not looking for something that doesn’t exist. In fact, I’ve developed the skills to find it.
Pizza of Doom 
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