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Minor set backs (we’re all good though)

A while ago I decided to write a post about relationship break up levels, how one person will start at level 10 and the other will be clawing themselves up from the lowest of lows and it’s all a process?

Well. Recently I’ve been thinking about how much easier life would be if that process was linear. But it turns out it isn’t.

You want to know why you cried over them today but yesterday you were excited to find someone new? Because falling out of love isn’t linear and as much as we’re taught how to love, we’re never taught how to stop.

We’re raised around the idea of once you fall in love it sticks, there’s no need to learn how to unlove someone. You never get taught to prepare yourself for someone walking out of your life when they were the ones who chose to be in it in the first place.

Why aren’t we taught how to walk away when we feel unappreciated, or how to stop loving someone who tells us they don’t want us? It isn’t an easy process. Your heart will always hold onto hope.

That’s why sometimes you don’t talk to them for weeks and then fall into a drunk slip up. But it’s ok, it happens. Own your s**t and move on.

You keep going back because your heart hasn’t yet caught up with your head and in most cases your head is the sensible bit, it’s the part of you that knows you’re better off without them. So when your heart does catch up you’ll be fine, but it’s a slow mother f***er. So please bear with it.

There’s a song I keep thinking of recently because there’s a line in it that goes like this “if you’re going to break my heart, do it right, don’t leave me holding on like the last time” I listen to it and I’m like, yeah you know what, if someone tells you they don’t want you, but they only partly mean it so basically, they’re saying it to push you away while they try to figure it out, how is that fair? You’re in or you’re out dumb ass. Because it isn’t helping the whole linear break up situation if you’re not sure that they’re sure, you know?

But it’s true and it’s another reason why our hearts hold onto people, because if someone hasn’t broken it properly then it just sits itself in limbo. Which is super annoying.

I don’t even know what classes as proper heartbreak either, is it being cheated on by the one person who was your whole world? Is it seeming them move on with someone you considered a friend? Or is it when you’re sat in front of the man you love and having to listen to him tell you that he doesn’t feel anything for you? All these possible heartbreak situations are pretty f***ed but is one more legit than the other? Like on a scale of having your heart broken, does one of these ending versions make the most sense when we think of what proper heartbreak is?

Because personally, I think all versions of a break up will hurt just the same. It doesn’t matter what scale of trauma they fall on, to you, it’s horrific.

So next time you pick your phone up and you’re about to message them, try to think what the outcome will be. Are you doing it just because you’re drunk, or because you want them back in some way, maybe it’s just because you like knowing you have access to them still? Whatever you want the outcome to be, just have it clear in your mind.

But whatever the way. Healing will never be linear, you’re allowed to be sad some days and happy the next. You’re allowed to cry because you miss them one minute and pick yourself up and go out on a date the next.

THERE ARE NO RULES. STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP!

P.S the song I mentioned can be found here for whoever wants to listen to it. Enjoy!

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Therapy session 1 – it’s a process

Sending yourself to therapy, does that make you crazy? Maybe it makes you attention seeking? Like you’re looking for a problem that maybe doesn’t even exist. You’re looking for something or someone to blame all your out of character actions on perhaps?

But your brain is an organ, and just like your liver or your heart it can get sick when it isn’t treated with care, right?

We know all about the things we should and shouldn’t eat, we know how much water to drink, we even know how many steps we should be doing a day and how many times a week we should be hitting the gym. So why do so many of us seem to falter when it comes to looking after out minds, like we don’t know how to care for that part of us or like asking for help from people to give it the care it needs means we feel weak and damaged.

Would you call someone who’s constantly suffering from heart attacks crazy for trying to go to a professional for help? Doubtful. so maybe more of us should shut the f***k up when it comes to giving an opinion on someone and their need to give their minds some more care and attention.

You know what the sad fact is, the people who take themselves to therapy are in most part only there to deal with the people in their lives who should be in therapy. Ironic really.

But anyway, how can I be a such a big advocate for something and be out here telling people around me that they’d benefit from going without actually trying it myself? Seemed hypocritical.

All I can say on a verdict on session one is this – we all have issues. Therapy actually takes a lot of mental strength. Most of us go into defence mode when someone points out an issue in us, so get ready to battle some demons that you’ve hidden down VERY deep. Get ready to have memories triggered that you didn’t even know existed. And for me, quite possibly the worst part …. get ready to cry in front of a stranger who’s managed to trigger an emotional response in you just by talking about what’s currently happening in your life.

Something no one knows really is this, you’re actually going to feel worse before you feel better. As memories and experiences get dragged up out of the gutter of your subconscious it feels like you have to start from basement level to work your way up.

If you’re going to therapy to look for other people to blame for your issues, then you’re probably not going for the reasons you should be, and if you come away with a victim mindset, then you’re not ready to do the growth you should be expecting either.

Therapy isn’t there to give you an out for being a shitty person. It’s there to help you understand all the things that go on in your head when you don’t understand them yourself. It’s there to give you valuable tools so you can stop falling into recurring toxic patterns and making the same mistakes.

But above anything. I think the most important thing to understand is this: therapy is not for the weak, it’s for people who want to understand themselves and are ready to stop making the same mistakes they always do.

It takes a lot of mental strength to voluntarily go through a process like this. And I’m still very much a big advocate for it, but only for those who I think have the mental competency to hack the journey it takes you on.

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Confirmation Bias and a serious case of regression

Did you know our brains are there to protect us from things that we register as dangerous? Like it will literally send chemicals around our body when it senses danger.

And you know what we register and scary and dangerous? – the unknown. And what gives us the biggest sense of “the unknown”? Well … a break up.

When a relationship ends we enter into the biggest unknown phase that we’ve been in for a while, so we tend to go into flight or fight mode.

We start going over things in our minds like, what will I do without them, how will I fill my time, what will my future look like. Etc. Etc. But all of these questions open us up to the big scary “unknown”

To our brains …. regression is the biggest form of self protection because it’s taking us back into a sense of known behaviour and our brains associate that with being safe. Our brains will literally play neurological tricks on us to make us feel like the sun shines out of someone’s back side and they can do no wrong, just because dating someone new seems too scary.

So wether you’ve just been dumped or you’ve just dumped someone, keeping a good check on your brains need to regress to your former person because they represent safety is something I would definitely recommend.

Before going back to someone you need to ask yourself these questions because another neurological issue we can be facing is falling into a state of confirmation bias.

What is confirmation bias I hear you asking?Well … you know that saying about rose tinted glasses? It’s kind of like that. It’s when our brain goes looking for memories to back up our own views and in the case of a break up, our beliefs are that the person we aren’t with anymore was the best person in the whole entire world because our desired outcome is to believe that we won’t ever find anyone that compares to them.

When we feel ourselves missing someone our brains will literally search for reasons as to why this is true, so suddenly all we can think about are the positives in an ex just so our brains can back itself up for missing them.

So when the need to regress tricks your neurological systems into a state of confirmation bias, remember that everyone has a flaw. Seriously … everyone does and I can guarantee that for every one thing you miss about someone, there will be two things that make you better off without them.

So here are the questions I like to ask myself to make sure I’m not being tricked by my own love confused brain post break up.

1. What did they bring to me that I can’t bring to myself?

2. What was a deal breaker I was happy to overlook while I was with them but not now?

3. Did they do as much for me as I done for them?

4. What traits that they have are actually irreplaceable?

Dig deep when you think about answering these, because I can guarantee that when you really think about it, you’ll see that your brain has probably tricked you into a right f***ed up confirmation bias situation!

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KISMET; Our story by definition

Kismet; destiny; fate. Commonly used to refer to something that one believes was “meant to be”—or the reason why such a thing happened.

In a world where leaving each other has become more and more frequent, I can’t help but sit and wonder, what are the break up rules for something that doesn’t feel like it’s actually over? How do you handle going from having someone who’s your everything to suddenly nothing, not because anything has gone wrong or someone has done something unforgivable, but actually because one persons mind has gone into such a negative place that they’ve pushed you so far out of the picture they can’t even have space for you anymore.

When should you listen to what your gut is telling you and just give up on all hope of there being a potential with someone? But what’s even more confusing is when your gut is telling you not to give up. It’s saying don’t give up on a person because although they aren’t there right now somehow you know they will be in the future.

Should we be prepared to go through a long slow painful process of letting our hearts heal, or should we just throw caution to the wind and jump straight back into the dating game even though we know the person we’re supposed to be with is just missing right now.

Maybe healing is hidden deep within long conversations with friends who help you to understand where things went wrong. Or maybe it’s in the many glasses of wine consumed in front of your new Netflix binge with your housemate. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s hidden in the new self discovery path you’ve decided to take to better understand yourself and how you can make yourself feel more confident and successful.

So here’s to us, and our ‘kismet’.

I’ll always believe this …. because there was too much ‘coincidence’ surrounding me and you for it not to have been fate (or my new favourite word kismet) that we would cross each other’s paths one day.

However, I’m not sure it was actually for the reason that I thought it would be.

When we talk about fate we imagine some kind of collision of worlds, where two people who are meant to be together finally find each other and above everything else in the world they’ll figure things out, fight for each other and push through anything that life throws at them (once they’re together) because they are just MEANT TO BE.

But that isn’t what happened, in fact the twist of fate that bought us together shon a light on the aspects we needed to work on without ourselves so brightly, that the need for personal growth and reflection was almost uncomfortable and it drove us apart.

But maybe that’s what fate had in mind? Maybe all the ‘coincidental’ twists that made our lives so similar in such weird ways were bringing us together to force us to see how we needed to grow. Or at least, that’s how I like to think of it.

Do I think that’s the end of the journey that fate had planned for us? Absolutely not.

Do I think that changes need to be made before we actually work? Absolutely yes.

Do I think you’ll do the personal work you need to do in order for us to work? Again … absolutely not.

Which is sad. Because I do genuinely believe there’s a reason why me and you keep getting drawn back together. I think it’s on a subconscious level that neither of us really know what to do with.

So until the next time of being drawn back together. I’ll enjoy thinking about how our story is still unfolding.

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Sounds like you’ve got a lot of baggage

Imagine that. Imagine someone who used to claim to love you telling you that no one after them will love you because you now sound like you’ve got ‘baggage’

Maybe that should come on the warning label when you date someone with a narcissist personality. Not only will the tear you down when you guys are together, but they will continue to do so once they aren’t even in your life.

Funny thing is, that so called ‘baggage’ they’re claiming makes you unlovable is only from all their unneeded extras they’ve left you with. You know when you get to the airport and realise you need to get rid of a few things you don’t actually want because your suitcase is too heavy, yeah well that’s the crap they left you with.

You were just fine, in fact your suitcase was way under the weight limit, but the stuff they left you with weighed 10x the amount of anything you actually owned yourself.

But it’s ok, because a heavier suitcase just means you need to develop a more keen sense of awareness for what muscles are working to carry this heavier weight.

If we’re speaking metaphorically, the muscle they’ll have left you needing to work on is actually your brain. But god damn will that muscle be toned af for the next person who wants to try and join you at this made up airport (kind of like a terming to jet off to a perfect healthy relationship).

Here’s the part when you can thank your narcissistic piece of s**t ex for leaving you with the weight of your relationship and where it went wrong because all they’ve done is provide you with the ability to sense someone with negative intentions a mile off.

Typically speaking, this kind of ex will normally be the second person you fall in love with. And this is based off of the findings of anthropologist Helen Fisher and according to her we only fall in love three times in our life but our second love, well that’s the hardest one.

It’s the one that teaches us lessons about who we are and how we often want or need to be loved.

Our second love will typically become a cycle, often one we keep repeating because we think that somehow the ending will be different than before. Yet, each time we try, it somehow ends worse than before and we focus so much on making it work that we will tend to lose sight of if we actually should be trying to make it work at all.

More often than not, our second love is unhealthy, unbalanced or narcissistic. Most likely there will be high levels of drama. This is exactly what keeps us addicted to this storyline, because it’s the emotional roller coaster of extreme highs and lows and like a junkie trying to get a fix, we stick through the lows with the expectation of the high.

So it’s no surprise really that this love has just us with some ‘baggage’.

However …. what it has done is shown us exactly what we don’t want from a love that we will have forever. It’s also taught us lessons that we would never have learnt if it wasn’t for going through this experience.

So thank your second love, for leaving you with their baggage (and then kindly reminding you of it years later just to make sure you don’t move on from them) because without them, you wouldn’t know what a healthy long lasting relationship is and how to cherish the man/woman that makes you feel safe and respected.

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That Narcissistic Lover Broke Her

The Vampire Diaries discovered by Tay on We Heart It

When she fell in love with a narcissist she sadly lost a part of herself that will never come back. And while you’ll never meet the old her, the one that fell in love without caution and wasn’t afraid of being hurt, the version of her that stands in front of you now is wiser and more well rounded when it comes to life, but you need to understand why she does things in ways that maybe you won’t always understand.

All those times when you’ve found her difficult to read or confusing to deal with, just remember at one point she had her own self worth shattered into a million pieces by the one person she thought loved her more than anything.

When she hears you call her beautiful there’s always going to be a small part of her that thinks you’re only saying it because you know it’s what she wants to hear. I know you’re wondering why your compliments always partly fall on deaf ears, or when she does acknowledge them they’re greeted with more of a shrug and a laugh, but it’s because she’s used to compliments always being followed with a ‘but‘ things that should have made her feel like a princess were always tinted by comparing her to others and making her feel like she could be better, prettier and smarter ‘Your hair looks so beautiful when you have it straight‘ he would whisper in her ear ‘but don’t you think it would look better how that woman over there has hers, when women have a slight wave in their hair it looks so effortless‘ so from that point on, she maybe straighten her hair once or twice a year.

He changed her, he convinced her that she never looked as good with light hair and that the only colour she should have on her nails was red. He picked out what was and wasn’t appropriate for her to wear, so if you see her pulling at her skirt when you’re together it’s probably because she’s worried you think its too short or ‘not appropriate‘. In the back of her mind her appearance and how she comes across to others is always going to play on her mind. She knows she needs to look elegant and well put together to qualify as ‘girlfriend material’.

She needs that physical closeness, she needs lots of contact with you to feel wanted, her heightened sexual appetite is partly fuelled by her past, a past that taught her that sex was how you create a connection with someone. She learned that you didn’t need endless conversations and to really get to know the good and bad in someone. As long as he wanted her body it meant that she was wanted. She isn’t used to someone wanting to hear about her passions and what makes her tick, what she’s used to is someone telling her that her ambitions are ‘ridiculous‘ and she should aim for something more ‘realistic‘. She’s not used to being around someone who sees life in technicolour like she does, someone who embraces imagination and creativity and encourages her to go after the shit she wants because of course she can achieve it if she sets her mind to it.

She knows it’s annoying how badly she deals with confrontation, if something annoys her she’ll spend days trying to figure out a way to bring it up to you without sounding ‘crazy‘ a word she’s heard so many times before when she’s bought up things that made her uncomfortable, so now …. she stresses about it instead of talking about it, she’s used to bottling her feelings because expressing them was never met by calmness and understanding. But she hates how scared she gets to talk to you about things you wouldn’t even stress about.

You won’t understand why she pushed you away so hard at the start, but her fear of letting someone in as much as she’d done before triggered her avoidant dismissive attachment style and she needed to show that she didn’t need anyone.

She’s used to being chased relentlessly, but she’s also used to being told that she isn’t enough once the chase is over.

When she fell in love with a narcissist she never knew how much long term damage it would do, and if she did …. she would never have let the years of turbulence play out until she became so dependant on one person that she totally lost her own identity.

When you encourage her to go away and do her own things, it scares her, she won’t ever admit that to you because she’s so fiercely independent, but it triggers a deep set anxious side of her that only comes out when she’s dating. When you encourage her to not need you, she thinks it’s because you’re getting ready to leave her.

While she never wants to need you, if she falls for you, she will need you and thats because of past experiences.

She’s not as fierce and scary as you may think, but the shield she’s put up to protect herself from people like the ones in her past, makes her seem like she’s made from steel.

Her past broke her, but she’s spent a very long time rebuilding her own little castle. It’s important you understand that after she’s fallen in love with a narcissist, she’s always going to be a bit trickier to understand. But if she loves you, you’ll never experience a love like it again, because after that kind of trauma …. she will forever go to the end of the earth for the right person she finds to be deserving of her and her heart.

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Friends with all the benefits (kind of)

gif love Black and White mila kunis friends with benefits Justin ...

Let’s be friends ….. we could go for a coffee and spend time doing all the things we both love doing.

Let’s go to all our favourite restaurants and cater to our ‘foodie’ personalities while we talk about everything and anything, I’ll listen to you while you tell me about what’s bothering you and I won’t do it because I want to give an opinion, I’ll do it because I want to listen to you talk. I want to hear you talk about everything that scares you until it feels like it isn’t scary anymore.

Let me calm your chaotic mind while we sit in a quiet coffee shop watching the world go by, creating imaginary lives for the people who walk past us.

I want to get wrapped up in silly moments that turn into hours, which accidentally turn into days, because time fly’s when you’re having fun right?

Let’s go and lose ourselves in a stupidly competitive game of Mario Kart and then maybe catch a film so we can enjoy sitting near each other while not having to say a word.

I can see all the benefits to this friendship.

Let me talk to you about all the things I’m excited to do and about all the visions I have for my business, while you sit and admire my ambitious personality.

Let’s walk the city streets together and find all the hidden gin bars that no one else knows about because then they can be ‘our’ drinking spots, maybe we can sit and drink while day fades into night.

Or how about, Netflix … but it’s my choice of course, because my taste in shows and films has always been better.

Let’s lay on the couch together at the end of a long day or in the middle of a lazy Sunday afternoon and flick something on that can play in the background while we both drift in and out of sleep in the comfort of each other’s company.

Because we can do that and be friends, right?

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Just one more

Animated gif about love in r u mine? by mami on We Heart It

Do you think you’d be able to give me one more kiss?

Because maybe I’d be able to find closure on your lips and then I’ll feel like I can go.

Maybe, we could also have one more breakfast, one more lunch and just one more dinner, because then I’d be full and happy and then we can part ways.

But maybe in between the meals we could lay in bed together one more time and create one more prolonged moment where times stands still and everyone and everything around us just falls away as I rest my head on your chest.

I guess my hope is that if we add up all the one mores, they’ll add up to make a lifetime and I’ll never have to get to the point where I let you go.

But that’s not real is it? There won’t be any one mores and there won’t be a version of us where everything is new and exciting and the possibilities of the world seemed endless. I mean they still are endless, for you and for me, but not for us.

Somewhere between here and there, and then and now, we just stopped working and we grew up. I guess that’s the thing with childhood love though, it seems perfect and unbreakable … until it isn’t.

So maybe I just want one more opportunity to accept that we’re done and that closure will never be found with you, but instead it will be found in the life I create without you. In all the new moments I have in my life where I don’t have thoughts of you and I and that’s where I’ll find my closure.

Because I don’t want to risk having my heart break all over again, just to have one more moment with you.

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Break Up Levels

When a break up happens, inevitably one person is going to be the one that gets dumped and the other one is going to be the heartbreaker.

But when this happens, the two people involved will be starting at two opposite ends of the break up scale, and here’s how it works.

Level 1 vs level 10

While a break up may heart wrenching and make your stomach hurt, take some solace in knowing that if you’re the one who’s been dumped, you’ve started at level 10 (which is the worst by the way) … this is the top end of the break up scale, where you can’t sleep or eat, you don’t know what you’ll do without them in your life and you feel as though the world as you know it is falling out from under your feet.

The person who’s broken up with you however, they’ve started at level 1 … they feel pretty relieved, in their head they had probably already ended things with you a few weeks before they actually had the guts to do it in real life. So right now, they’re just happy its all over and done with and they can carry on their life without you, the one they think they want, but realistically there’s no progress for them to make in this situation, there’s nothing they have to deal with because it wasn’t a shock for them, they knew what they were going to do. So starting at level 1, maybe not as great as we think it may be!

Level 3 vs level 8

Now lets fast forward a few months, your level 10 has now dropped to a level 8. You still miss them like crazy, but after lots of free therapy sessions with your friends, you’re starting to feel a lot better than how you were when you initially got the news, you can see that you can still have a life without them and it won’t be as awful as you think.

Our level 1 people, well they’re now at level 3. They’re still doing all the things they wanted to do, going out and being selfish with their own time and they’re enjoying it. But every now and then, something will happen in their every day life and they wish they could tell you about it, but of course …. that privilege is gone for them now. They don’t have the person there who used to take a keen interest in their work, or smile at the dog pictures they used to send, but it’s fine and they’re not too bothered by it, they know they’ll find someone else to do all that stuff with soon anyway so it’s not a big deal.

And here’s where it starts to get interesting, because ever so slowly, the two of you are coming towards being at the same level of getting over your break up but you’ve come from different ends of the scale, as the one who started out heartbroken and devastated is now healing and moving forward …. the one who done the heartbreaking is now starting to realise what they’ve given up on.

Meeting in the middle at level 5

At around the five months later mark, our level 8 people have probably now dropped to level 5. You’re making future plans and when you’ve been making them you haven’t even considered your previous SO in the picture, you haven’t been doing a ‘well what if‘ kind of plan that might involve them, nope. You’re focusing on you and you’re thriving as if a glow was going out of fashion.

At the same time, our people who were at level 3, are also now at level 5 too. They’ve been on a few dates and each one without even wanting to, they’ve been comparing them to you. They’re keeping active tabs on the person they thought they were ‘so done‘ with. They want to know what’s happing in your life, they can see that you’re doing good and you look happy, they’ve heard about all your exciting plans and they’re gutted they don’t have a more active role. They miss you …. but now they don’t know if they want to try and make a come back.

You see how although you’re both at the same level, because you’ve got there via two very different routes, it just isn’t the same situation for both of you!

Level 5 is the pin point, because if the person who broke your heart does decide to reach out, PLEASE make sure they don’t push you all the way back to level 10 again …. because if you hit level 10, it means they’ll go back to level 1, they know you’re still there and that satisfies their ego …. unless of course they really are sorry, but if they are, then they need to work HARD to get you back!

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You know both of you can feel that sexual tension, right?

Damn, there it is. That weird feeling in the room, you’re both in, you know she can feel it too, right? It’s not just you. You guys both feel it but yet neither of you are going to say a word.

You guys should ignore it, right? But wait, apparently there’s something fun about doing things when you know you shouldn’t and it becomes even more fun when the only people who know what’s going on are the two of you.

She knows you feel it too, because she saw the way you look at her still, did you think you could slyly check her out and she wouldn’t pick up on it? Don’t be silly, she knows you too well not to notice. And now the two of you keep making eye contact, creating tension in the air that’s almost palpable. She even saw the very brief way your eyes wondered down to her lips, it must be annoying to know she noticed something you probably didn’t even realise you’d done, but you know what it means when you look at someones lips right? It just means subconsciously you’re thinking about kissing them …. uh oh.

You know you shouldn’t look at her like that, especially if you’re not going to take control and do something about it, you should just stop it. All the eye contact going on is a slow killer and you know it’s working up the both of you. As soon as you locked eyes with her it threw you back to thinking about how she looked at you when she wanted your body close to her. A little eye contact can start a very dangerous game, but yet it seems you’re both excited to play.

When there are thousand words left unsaid in a room where the tension keeps growing, how much longer can it go on before the room explodes and one of you caves? It’s a game of willpower now, but you’re both stubborn so will it be left as a draw? Surely that’s too boring? … Everything deserves a climax, right?

This could be fine, things can be left without a resolution, just remember social distancing. As long as the two of you remain at least 1.5m apart from each other at all times it will be totally fine.

Because let’s face it, as soon as you step closer to each other that’s when the test will level up, as if the eye contact and smiles weren’t bad enough, just wait until you’re accidentally stood close enough to feel the heat coming off of each other’s bodies, or the way her perfume smells, that’s the smell you got used to having on your bedsheets, but it’s been absent for a while, so what’s going to happen, what if you remember you’ve missed it?

Is it even worth the risk to find out? Probably not, right?

It’s worth knowing though, this isn’t just in your head, you aren’t imagining this feeling because she feels it too, she can sense the way you want her just from the atmosphere that ever so slightly changes each time you guys look at each other. If only everyone else in the room knew what the two of you were actually thinking …. it would make a good explicit novel that’s for sure.

Why not take it one step further next time, stand closer to her, or maybe risk one more civilised kiss on the cheek to have her face close to yours again even just for a second, or are you worried you’ll want to keep her there for longer than a split second if you do it again? Risky game, right?

But what’s life without a bit of risk, well it’s just boring.