Dear Emily,
I am an only daughter with three brothers, and it was very traumatic for my family when I got pregnant in high school by a boy from a poor family. They lamented that I threw away my future. I was sent to relatives in the north to give birth.
While waiting for my due date, my strict aunts made me learn a trade “for my own good.” This, they said, would give me financial independence later on. I turned that little trade into my little business after a few years.
After so much hard work as a single mother, my daughter went on to become a lawyer. Life’s been good.
The child I bore when I was still in high school looks just like my sister now. Her father, who was prevented by my family from seeing me and our daughter, has also made good on his own. He now owns a trading company, and has even hired his daughter to work as his lawyer. He has a family, and they’re on good terms with my daughter.
Recently, he confessed to me that he never stopped loving me all these years. He said he wants to be with me now more than before, but doesn’t have the courage to separate from his wife.
I love him too, but not in the same way he loves me, and I too have no guts to tell him I am so over him and can’t put him back in my heart again. I don’t want to hurt him. Life is just too complex.
Over and Out
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, in geometry. Tell him exactly how you feel in simple, sincere words. Make it as clear as possible, with no nuances hanging up in the air. Of course it’ll hurt him, but you two will always belong to each other no matter what—in the daughter you both love. This fact should ease his pain a bit.
Life truly is complex. We will never know why events don’t jibe the way we want them to. But that’s what makes living so exciting. These never-ending U-turns and constant roller-coaster-like ups and downs—without actually riding one—can truly be so trying!
Perhaps your feelings can be paraphrased in this line spoken by a celebrity: “You do not want to waste more time on what displeases you or hurts you… not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty…” Does that sum up who you are now?
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