Letting go is widely romanticised, so much so that when you are the main character, it almost feels altruistic. There is this notion that letting someone go is going to make them better. There is this quote you hear again and again, from movies, from friends, plastered on every book that remotely has the trope of the one who got away: it is for the better of all. But is it? Or is that something we say to make ourselves feel better? Isn’t letting go simply a selfish act, sometimes even a cowardly one disguised as something for the better of all? It reeks of a similar smell as people who give to charity so that they can rise in their social circle.
Letting someone go because you could not hold on anymore. Letting go because it was too hard to match up with what they wanted. Letting go because it’s hard to keep pace with them. Letting go because it’s easier. Letting go because you do not want to fight anymore. Letting go because hurting was never part of the plan.
I have been in the place where I have advised my friends, as well as myself, to let go, to release myself from the hurt, because I thought that’s the right way to go about it. But then the question remains: who decides what’s right? The one place where the black-and-white world of right and wrong doesn’t work is in relationships. Maybe letting go seems like it’s better for everyone because we are too scared of what might happen if we keep holding on: what might we see, what might they see, what might be revealed about us, the sides of us which we ourselves have not met. What if the clingy, angry, frustrated, interrogative, emotionally volatile sides come out? What if it’s rejected by the one person we want to be seen as the angel and the dream person? What if it’s not rejection of our love but the rejection of our being? Maybe that’s why letting go so often seems like the “better for everyone” option. Sly way to exit the scene, before the sirens go off.
Which is why I think sometimes letting go also pulls you away from growth. To make an analogy, if you really want a specific career, let’s say becoming a cultural zeitgeist, won’t you put in the work? Even when it’s hard? Even when it makes you question certain strengths and weaknesses of yours? You would not let that dream go, just because it was chiselling you, right? If you had let that dream go, and said it was asking you to become too much, to be better, to face the reality of who you are today and the things that need to change, you would not call it altruistic or better for you, would you?
The most central part of any successful relationship is being able to be truly you, which means being vulnerable, not just about your past and fears, but also about parts of yourself you might not be very proud of, or parts which you did not even know existed in you. But more than that, it is about building love through each other. There is nothing called “the perfect love,” not in any relationship. Love is found in the curiosity about the other, in being delighted in how they would react to something and utterly surprised by how they see the world. It is launching an Artemis mission to their dark side, and having the courage to be changed by it. Love, put simply, is the willingness to learn.
So then, when you deny yourself and someone else the chance to learn you and themselves, because at times it might put you in a spaceship to the dark side of their moon, does it not make letting go selfish? Or is it just that some of us would rather stay in orbit than ever land?
(Please note this is not for someone who is in a bad or abusive relationship with anyone.)
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