Relationships: Are we really half of an orange?

by Valentina Carbajal
12/06/2019

In a relationship

When I was 17 years old I broke up with my first boyfriend. We had been together for four years and the illusion of the first love had made us believe that it would last forever. Although I do not know if you can call ‘illusion’ something that is presented as an absolute truth in the vast majority of books, songs and movies we consumed at that time. Especially in the Disney films to which I have enough traumas to thank for. That was when I realized my big mistake. We had an absolutely symbiotic, enveloping, suffocating relationship. When you have a boyfriend you’re supposed to spend time with your boyfriend, right? I thought that’s how things were done. I spent most of high school with him. We would see each between lessons, then we would get together after class and on weekends. When we broke up, I arrived to class and it was time for lunch and I realized that I did not have anyone to sit down with. I was embarrassed to go to the table of one of those many friends who I had left out. They had told me but I had not known how to handle it. I saw how my friends also got boyfriends and then ended their relationships and I saw this pattern repeated over and over again. When they were together they disappeared from social life, you could never make plans with them because they had already made plans with their partner. That was taught to us: that we had to get another. But what about getting ourselves? Get interests, hobbies, passions, objectives. I would love to be able to say that in my second relationship it did not happen again. That I had learned the lesson and I did not leave my friends aside. But no. I repeated the same thing again. Because I did not know how to be ‘one’ with the other. How to be ‘I’ in the company of the other. When there was an other, it only knew how to be ‘us’. But this did not only affect my social life, my relationship with my friends or my family. This also directly affected my relationship with my partner. I remember when my second boyfriend asked me if I had nothing to do and I looked at him strangely as if he spoke to me in Chinese. Now, many years later, a friend comes to tell me that she had this same conversation with her boyfriend. He said “you have to go out more with your friends, get yourself a hobby”. The thing is they drilled us with the idea to get the guy that once we have it we do not want to let go and it seems ridiculous to go to practice piano (you can tell I still do not know what a hobby is) rather than staying with your boyfriend. Every time I broke up with a boyfriend, my mother, who had barely spoken to them in all the years of relationship, cried as if saying “that’s it, you lost the chance, failed”. I do not see my break ups like that. Sharing four years of existence with another being seems like a victory to me, a beautiful experience to treasure. We are so complex, it costs us so much to communicate, to share, to live together, to show ourselves vulnerable. Any amount of time we share – however short – with another person, and connect, should be celebrated.

Being single

The telephone rings. It’s my dad to wish me happy birthday. He asks me how old I am and he tells me that in the 19th century, at my age and without a boyfriend, I would have stayed to dress saints. I answer that how lucky we are not in that century anymore.
The feminist in me wanted to shout all sorts of things at him, but she restrained herself because she learned to choose her battles long ago. What I have not learned yet is that those stupid things don’t get to me. It affected me, it hurt me. I do not know if because he thought that I was not able to find someone who loved me or because he thought that without a couple something was missing, that it was not complete. I guess both.
For a long time, and more in his generation, they taught us that it was like that. That we were not complete. With the verse of the other half, of the half orange. Is there anything more useless than half an orange? What can be done with half an orange? Half dessert? Half a sip of juice? And so we go through life, unfinished, missing, debtors. Looking for someone to complete our orange when we really want a chocolate cake, or dulce de leche, or a whole bag of oranges.
Not only do you have to find your other orange but it is supposedly just one.
The idea of the half orange is extremely dangerous. If the other person is really “my other half” then he must understand me perfectly, assuming what I want / need / feel without having to communicate it to him. This clearly is not like that. Because we are different and independent and it is said singularity that we use to interpret situations. That is why we must be clear, the other is not in our mind, it is in his own.
Another complicated aspect that it brings is the fact that “finding” that person would seem to be the end of the story. The classic “and they lived happily ever after”. Nothing farther. Being in a relationship implies a continuous work of both parties.
Beware of expectations, especially those that are plain and simple: unreal. When you put the other on a pedestal and dream unattainable issues, you are condemning the relationship irremediably to failure. Give both of you a chance, keeping your feet on the ground.
The theme is to get rid of all the limiting beliefs that we have been carrying and that we have embedded in the depths of the collective unconscious and that lie in wait for us. They haunt us when we meet someone and we are not sincere because “it’s too early”. They lurk us when we accept things that hurt us because “men are like that”. They lurk us when we are in a relationship without love because “I’m going to end up alone.” And they haunt us when we have been doing an intense job of deconstruction and someone you want comes and tells you “you’re an old maid”.
It is difficult to shorten the gap between what we tried to unlearn and what we learned. Between theory and practice. Between what you feel and what you know. It helps not to be too hard on ourselves, to know that it is a process. It also helps to surround yourself with people who share your vision of how things should be.

The five truths to keep in mind before starting a relationship

1. You are complete

You are not half of anything or anyone. You are a complete and wonderful being.

2. You don´t need anyone

You are the only one who can give you everything you need. You do not need anyone else. You can choose to share your life with someone. But it is just that, a choice.

3. Love has no age

Get rid of all those beliefs about when and how things have to happen. People fall in love every day, at all times and at any age. You do not have an expiration date. You’re not a damn orange!

4.The only person who can make you happy is yourself

It doesn’t matter who you have next to you if you are not at peace with yourself. Happiness is something that resides within you. No one can come and “give it to you”. You have to give it to yourself, and then later you can share (with someone who is also at peace and happy with himself preferably).

5. Only the present matters

Do not get too involved in what will happen or what you would have done differently. We only have the present moment and this is where we find happiness. With or without a partner

I think that is the great learning. Understand how to be one, complete. A person with work, family, friends, hobbies, passions, responsibilities, desires and also with a partner. Get that balance. And I do not know if it happens to them (men) or if it was only us who were raised to be the company of someone else. Now it’s up to us to learn to be our own company and then see if we add someone else to the equation.

Journalist, communication and content creator, there is nothing that I love more than writing. I love being able to explore different themes and empathize through my writing.