How (not) to loose people by being a “good guy”.

Bharbara Souza
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

I’ve been observing myself and people around me; like, people in general, and I have noticed this one mistake, one wrong thing that we have done so often that it might have turned into this bad, silent habit, and it is buried so deep in our routine and our beliefs that we can’t normally recognize it, but it might be destroying our relationships.

We’ve been lying to ourselves and the ones we love.

And here’s how we do that even when we are trying to do exactly the opposite:

So there are these people that we care about, those for whom we always wish the best and hope deep inside our hearts that they’d be happy and healthy and successful forever if that’s even possible, right?

This could be about your partner, or children, or best friend or whoever means the world to you, but it feels like you are loosing them, slowly.

We can’t imagine ourselves doing anything on purpose to hurt one of them. We love them so damn much! So why are they getting so often offended, stricken, and defensive when everything we are trying to do is for their very best? Why did they become so distant and cold all of a sudden? Are they ungrateful assholes that can’t recognize all of the effort we have been doing for them to be happy?

Or Maybe… Just Maybe…

We just can’t be honest with our deep dark feelings behind the actions we take in the name of “love”?

So here is my thought:

Love does not hurt. Like, never. Well, at least it’s not supposed to.

I am not saying that your intentions aren’t good. They are. I am sure you care. I am sure you are doing everything you can to see that person happy. If you are a parent, you might often have to sacrifice a little moment of that happiness in your child’s life in order to guarantee it in the long run, right? We can’t let them do all of what they want.

But as much love as you can have for someone, you are still a person. And you are not made only by love. You have good and bad emotions running wildly inside of you, all the time. At the moment we are able to recognize the real emotions behind our actions, we get to understand why do people get hurt by us. At the moment we accept that we don’t have all the answers and we might not know what’s best for those we love, we understand that we cannot force them to accept our view on how they should be happy.

Trying to mask our impositions, or aggressiveness or harm with love, actually hurts more than doing all of this deliberately out of anger. Because the people that loves us come with this little defect: they fucking know us. Sometimes better than ourselves. We can’t just trick them into believing that we’ve done them wrong, disrespected them, trespassed their boundaries and mistreated them, cause we love them so much.

So if you still think this is all bullshit and still wanna play the good guy, I invite you to ask yourself a question: Think about the last bad scene you had with somebody you love. The last thing you said to each other that hurt. You spent some time apart, trying to manage your feelings and so. So now when you look back at it, If you were not feeling angry at that moment (or jealous, or frustrated) for whatever the reason, would you have done things the same way you did? If you were not mad at your children because they misbehaved, would you have whooped their asses the same? Do you hit them for every single fault, or just the ones that get under your skin?

l know that lot’s of people out there are well aware of their true intentions and just try to scam others into believing that they are doing all sorts of shit for love. These are sociopaths, LEAVE THEM IMEDIATELLY.

But taking a good look into ourselves and recognizing that we are not all good vibes, instagram’s eternal positiveness and butterflies, is hard, guys. It’s a hard step we might have to start taking in order to prevent the ones we love from walking away. Let’s do it healthily this time, shall we?

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