Jericho's Diary: Thank U, Next.

I've had my fair share of saying goodbye to past chapters. People who seemed to be irreplaceable characters have left, slowly being replaced by completely different persons in my life. My story-line has experienced many unexpected voltas, and I have come to terms with the fact that there will be many still to come. While most things become easier the more often you experience them, I've learned that farewells only seem to become harder over time. Those never get easier, especially when it comes to saying goodbye to your relationship.

Every break-up I have experienced - good or bad - has always been painful. I have always left a piece of myself with that person. After any break-up I needed time to mourn; not only for the end of the relationship I had with a person I once loved so dearly, but also for the part of myself that would forever be lost. However, I have learned that this lost love and part of me, would be a necessary step to something much more important: growth.

I have always been a person who loves hard and intensely. Whenever I would meet a person who was able to spark something in me, I would go in for 100%. Loyalty, commitment and dedication: those things just come naturally to me. I need to fully commit to someone, or not at all. My friends used to joke that there were two types of people in the world: Always-single and always-in-a-relationship type of people: and I was by far the latter. Casual flings just did not exist in my universe. I was only interested in the real love deal.

I would get such a rush from loving and being loved. In some way, this made me very prone to going too fast in relationships. Once I took a chance on a person, I went all in - even if I did not know the person well enough to give him my all. Thinking everything would work out between us, even though I still had many layers of differences to discover - that boy was me. You can have the best intentions in the world, but if the other person is not on the same page, things will never work out.

Sometimes this made me wonder why I found it so easy to commit to a person. Maybe I was more focused on the rush that being in love gave me, than on making the actual relationship work. Or maybe my ex-boyfriends were just not meant for me (yes, probably). To this day, I do not have a clear answer to this question. What I can say is that for me, love was a powerful & addicting drug - I was so focused, committed & in love with the other person, I would forget everything else. Including myself.

Since love was such a feeling for me, the break-ups felt extremely well too. Even though I broke off every relationship I had, it never felt that way for me. I always experienced it as if I was the person who the other left behind. Not only that: Every break-up cost a piece of me that I would never be able to get back. And this was very painful for me to realize. I would feel betrayed, hurt, and would always end up wishing I would have never even loved my ex to begin with. This made me jump from one serious relationship to another.

I wanted to forget my past relationship, and replace them with something better. Although this is arguably not the healthiest way to get over your ex, for me it worked. I was quite good at letting all my emotions out, and starting with a tabula rasa. I never went back to any of my ex-boyfriends. If you're out of my life, you're out. I do not have second chances. Furthermore, I was lucky enough to have only met pretty trustworthy and loyal guys at this point.

Ariana Grande said it best: Thank U, Next.

♡, Jericho.