These are my personal opinions. Always seek a professional when you're making choices about your mental health and well-being.

Don't ever take responsibility for wasting someone's life. I hear from people. They tell me that I was in this person's life for many years and I screwed up.

I was emotionally abusive or I did harmful behaviors or I was toxic or even I was a jerk or I cheated and all this stuff that we don't want in a relationship.

I agree.

I hear from people on that side and then I hear from people on the other side saying, stuff that we don't want in a relationship, I agree.

I hear from people on that side, and then I hear from people on the other side saying they were in my life for 15 years, 25 years.

And I feel like I wasted my entire time with them, like all 15 or 25 years.

I feel like I wasted all that time with someone who didn't care about me or didn't love me or didn't give me the life I wanted. And I could have done something else. We don't want to look at a relationship like that or somewhere we lived or a job that we had.

When we look at the past as a waste, we're focused on something that happened, but we're not

focused on what we learned from it.

And I know this sounds very simple.

We learned from our mistakes.

We learned from what happened to us.

And then we also tend to forget how the past shaped us.

And we also tend to forget that when we feel we are responsible for somebody else

wasting their time with us, that they had their own decisions to make, their own lessons

to learn, and they have a responsibility to themselves to stay another day with us or leave. Now there's a caveat to this which is we can or they can be manipulative.

They can be coercive. They can make us think they're going to change.

They can make us think or we can make somebody think that we're going to change or treat them better. Maybe we made a mistake and we say we're not going to make that mistake again and we do.

Maybe there's been cheating and the person says, I'll never cheat again and they do.

Then when we look back on the relationship, we might blame ourselves or they might blame themselves for being so stupid for

staying so long in something that was just a big waste of time.

...