The Wrong Relationship

Yesterday one foreign customer complimented my beauty. He himself is an expat who has lived in Finland for 20 years. He said he had always been attracted to eyes like mine - he called them special. I thanked him for his compliment and this incident reminded me of my past.

Back in Indo, ever since I was young, I never felt especially beautiful. I never felt ugly, either, but I knew what people considered "beautiful" - those who have bigger eyes, not a girl like me (case in point: in many Asian countries, those people who have slanted eyes try to make their eyes look BIGGER when they put on make-up. If you still don't believe me, just try googling Japanese manga series and you'll see that the idealized female person there has big eyes instead of slanted Japanese eyes. Want more proof? Try googling double eyelid surgery in Korea. So many people there have been getting the surgery to make their eyes look bigger.)

Anyway, when I was 19 going on 20, I met this guy online who made me feel especially beautiful. I knew he was a bad boy, but he was the first one ever who made me feel that I "shone among the others" (so to speak). He also taught me how to be open and by being open to him and still being accepted as who I was, I was drawn to him. He was the total opposite of me.

I knew our relationship was doomed from the start, but I did one of the most cliched mistakes a girl could ever make. I thought I could be the one who turned the bad boy into a good boy. Yep. Silly little me. We broke up not long after we met in real life. I realized even more after we met that we were just too different and there was no way I could ever change him. After all, we can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped, right?

There were times when I wished I could erase that part of my life, but now that I think about it...by making that mistake, I have learnt so much. First of all, I've learnt how to be open to people. Secondly, by having that short relationship, I learn how to set boundaries and thirdly I figured out what kind of qualities I was looking for in a guy.

When I had that brief relationship, I had been emailing with R2 as well, though we weren't too close yet. After I broke up with my first boyfriend and I got to know R2 even more and more, I realized that he was the one I was looking for all along. We're more in tune with each other and there are some similarities that make it easier for us to understand each other. R2 makes me feel safe because he's a steady person and he really tries his best to bridge the gap between us. Most of all, he's always brought up the best in me - and even more so in real life.

However, if I hadn't had the wrong relationship, I may have not been ready to be open with R2 and everything might have ended up differently. Because I could be open with R2 and I allowed myself to be vulnerable, he also felt more at ease to show me his vulnerability. That created so much closeness between us. And because at that time I knew already what type of qualities I looked for in a guy, I recognized them easily when R2 and I began to get to know each other better.

Anyway, back to the topic of beauty. Beauty is really tricky, don't you think? I think as time goes by, I've begun to appreciate more and more the individual beauty of people, including myself. While back in my past, I craved for other people's appreciation of my outer beauty, nowadays I hope I've learnt even better how to view people through God's eyes - that He's woven each one of us in a mother's womb...that each one of us is His beloved.