Love Arranged (#1)

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Five: Maggie

Love is so fucking complicated and stupid.

When it comes to love, they make a great deal out of selflessness and putting your significant other's needs before your own, to dismiss what you feel in order for your loved one to achieve their own form of happiness no matter how much it can be trying at times.

Even if it ends up being one-sided.

But most of the time you can't ignore what you feel, you can't ignore the selfish sides of you as a person even if you try to suppress it long enough just so you can see the person that you love happy.

But sometimes the scales get a little bit uneven and you don't always find yourself being impartial, sometimes you think about yourself and how it affects you.

Even if you know deep down what you're doing is wrong.

When my mother and father got together because of an arranged marriage, my mother knew she had to adjust to the life my father wanted in whatever way he saw fit.

The only downside to that however is that the life he wanted was one that didn't involve her nor anyone else, just him and what made him happy.

My father never wanted to get engaged to my mother, he wanted a life of his own where he controlled his own freedom and his ways on how to live it.

He was like me, I thought. When I first stepped into this engagement I knew damn well the only thing I was able to sympathize with my father was the lack of choice I was given.

I didn't agree with my mother's decisions and quite frankly I even resented them, and the thing with me is that as much as I loved my mother I so desperately didn't want to end up like her.

Being in some sort of one-sided romance with a man who didn't love her and being fooled into thinking that having someone else control your life was acceptable. Hence the outcome of Levi and I's relationship and my tendency of butting heads with Evan in the past.

But here's the thing that I noticed about life. As much as you try to avoid the one thing you fear, you're gonna have to eventually come to terms that you have to confront what you're most afraid of in order to overcome it.

And as much as I feared going through what my mother had gone through, I knew I was gonna eventually experience something... not necessarily the same thing she experienced, but something that was gonna hurt me in the same way her past hurt her.

That as much as I wanna avoid being selfish, needy, weak, and sentimental the way she was during the lowest points in her life, those things are only natural when it comes to life.

That even though she was selfish and destructive, to the point where it led to her keeping up with my father's resentment just as long as he stayed around long enough for him to be her husband. Because she loved him, after all.

Even though he clearly didn't love her.

He kept relentlessly reminding her that every day and to make sure she knew that for as long as they were together, but her selflessness to put his needs before her own tied with her need to keep him around, even though she knew it was wrong.

But there was an engagement they needed to abide by and they had no choice.

But she had that choice, that choice to let him live freely and to not hurt herself with the constant reminder that the man she loved didn't love her.

But it was her own selfish needs that were getting in the way of that as much as it was his own rightful need to be away from her, to be selfish but in a way that didn't have to hurt anyone.