would say that was if she didnt really love me the way I loved her. I told her that I was okay even
though I wasnt and told her I would just give up.
After sharing you my extremely heartfelt story, I know start to separate myself from any
biases that I may have and suspend my judgement on whether or not I should have given up. I will
bracket all emotions I have to be neutral and to fully dissect the experience as to see it from the
spectator point of view. I aim to attain a better understanding of what had happened before. I will
now merely look at the story as the process of giving up.
After assuming the role of a neutral spectator, I will now try to manipulate the factors which
had caused the experience and then ultimately lead to the attainment of its essence. The same event
will be presented but with variations to attain the essence. Did I give up because I thought all hope
was lost? Yet how did I manage to maintain courting her for the time presented? Why did I only give
up at that time? Perhaps I thought it would still lead to the end I was hoping for. Was it possible that I
was merely tired of waiting? Although if I truly loved her, I could have waited for her even longer.
Would I have given up if she treated me differently? Yet I fell in love with the way she interacted
with me. Would I have done the same thing if I was older and more mature? If I were older, would
the effort given increase or decrease or maybe even stay the same? The time when the experience
happened was possibly full of naivety since I was merely getting prepared for college. Would
everything have been different if what happened at prom was the way I planned it to be and we could
have been together now? Should I have taken the hints before and quit early on? Was it possible that
she thought that I wasnt really in love with her and she couldnt take the risk of investing her
feelings on something that could not be real and would ultimately lead to heartbreak on her side if I
were to leave her in the end? Were her words You should find someone else for her or for me?
Could it be that she thought I was too good for her and she didnt deserve the love I was giving her
given the way she was treating me? Was I really in love? Could I have been in just a slightly deeper
feeling of infatuation? How could I prove that it was really love? I had no experience before this so
everything was a first for me. The only reason I could probably say that I did was because of the
pain. The pain is the only thing I know that is completely and utterly real. And here I stand
wondering what the true cause of the experience is. I must first affirm the essence of giving up and
using the factors above, I could conclude the one true final essence of giving up would be doubt.
Doubt that everything you were doing could have been false.
Having finished reducing the possibilities which had led to the experience, I now fully
acknowledge my place as being completely conscious of the act. Reminiscing myself at that span of
time, I have come to the understanding that the factors werent too much to ponder on as the final
decision was mine to make. The final reduction of the experience that I have perceived first hand is
that I gave up simply because I wanted to. It came to the point wherein I was solely focused on her
that I started to forget about myself. After the given amount of time, one might think that she should
already answer me since not many men can do what I have done yet I didnt even get to the stage of
MU (mutual understanding) wherein both are aware of how they feel about another. I then came to
the conclusion, being able to unbracket all the things that set aside before, that if she could not show
the same level of affection after those two years of faithful courting then she does not deserve me
anymore. Selfish and proud as it may sound, truly being able to love someone means being able to
love yourself first and that includes knowing what youre truly worth. And that is my
phenomenology of giving up.