When someone breaks your heart, it’s easy to focus on how they hurt you. But it’s also easy to forget that you, too, have broken someone else’s. You’ve met people who loved you, but you couldn’t love them back. And you’ve had to let go of someone to save yourself, even if it meant hurting them. Maybe they didn’t understand your actions at the time. And maybe they lost sleep wondering what went wrong–just like you have.

Heartbreak is a universal feeling. At some point, someone will break our hearts, and we will break someone else’s. Since you can’t live your life for someone else, you’ll eventually have to turn them down. This choice will inevitably hurt someone you care about.

We’re all the bad person in someone else’s story.

But that doesn’t mean you’re malicious; often, it just means you’re human. Sometimes, you can love everything about someone, but the romantic spark doesn’t exist for you. They may not understand when you tell them you don’t want to see them anymore, or that you just want to be friends. So they might see your actions as a betrayal. 

At some point, you will hurt someone by not reciprocating their feelings. But they will have to learn how to move forward without you. It sounds brutal when you break it down in that way, but honesty will always hurt less than leading someone on. 

After all, you cannot force yourself to love someone–nor should you ever try to. It’s far better temporarily being the bad person in someone’s story than being the villain whose love for them was never real. 

It’s difficult to see how our actions affect others. You may not realize in the moment that a comment you made, or an action you took, hurt someone else. Every day, we make millions of choices that seem inconsequential to us, but devastating to someone else. Maybe you forgot to tell them happy birthday because you were too wrapped up in work to remember to check your calendar. 

Of course, you might mean no harm when you do things of that nature, but you never know what someone else feels. Maybe you were the tenth person to forget that it was their birthday that week. Unfortunately, we don’t always know how much we affect someone until it’s too late. 

At some point, you have to accept that you will hurt others, and they will hurt you. 

You cannot be best friends with everyone; you cannot make everyone love you; and you cannot make yourself love everyone. If you want genuine connection, then you’ll eventually break some hearts along the way, just as someone will break yours. One day, someone will look at you and think you’re the one they’ve been waiting for, and you will not feel the same way. 

Of course, this will devastate them. This will hurt them. But one day, they’ll be grateful you told them the truth. One day, they’ll meet the person truly meant for them. And they will be so glad that you broke their heart to get them there. 

Though we can’t avoid hurting others, we can do our best to be kind.

We can choose to live our lives as honestly and kindly as we can. Since life is a continuous lesson on what it means to be a person, we can only do our best. We can show up each day and be kind. 

At the same time, we need to accept that, at some point, we’ll fail miserably–whether intentional or not. But just because we’re a bad person in someone’s story doesn’t mean that’s where the story has to end. 

They will find happiness again, and so will you.