The Bad Investment Loop / Investing in the Market of Love

Investing in the market of love
by Howard Go

One of the saddest reasons to stay in a relationship is also one of the most questioned reasons. This is the reason that involves one's investment. It creates a circular flow for itself. If you've ever thought to yourself, "I've already committed so much that to leave now would have made all these years been for naught," then you're in the bad investment loop.
Just like a financial investment that we can't seem to get out of, we invest more and more and lose more and more. So long as we don't want to lose what has already been invested without seeing some returns, we continue to invest more. The sad truth is that we have already lost what has already been invested. It's all a question of losing more or getting away with what one still has.
This kind of reasoning becomes sad when we question its argument almost daily, but return to the comfort of its contention at the end of each day. Its contention being, we have so much to lose (everything we've invested and committed) if we leave now. What is worse is when we start imagining signs of the returns in the horizon, when we begin creating illusions of reaping what we have sown. The disappointment that follows will only make our acceptance of this reasoning even sadder.
Blaise Pascal once wrote, "For those who believe, there is always enough light to see; for those who do not believe, there is always enough darkness not to see." This statement was made in the context of having or not having faith in God. Its truth expands to almost any horizon where logic does not rule, where we have to believe in some intangible truth that will always escape the power of reason.
In such realms, the logic behind our actions fades to the background as we take repeated leaps of faith in what we do. We are creatures of faith in all our most important and self-defining actions. In all our investments and commitments, we do not know what waits around a corner?-we just believe that we do. This belief is what determines whether we take the step toward the turn. It is this faith that allows us to see enough to take the next step; it is this lack of faith that lets us fumble and fall and take a different kind of step (or take no step at all).
It is when we are caught in the argument of the bad investment loop that we tell ourselves that things will get better or, worse, that there is no other investment that we can make at this point in time. In either case, we make ourselves believe there is only one path left for us to take; the only difference is, in the first, we keep believing that the next corner of this one-track path holds the promise of happiness, while in the latter, we create the illusion that all the other corners in the streets of our lives hold darker, more terrifying, more depressing possibilities. We see what we want to see so that we can live with the choices we've been making all our lives.
When we believe things will get better, we usually end up thinking that the standard of happiness is the past, when things seemed too good to be true. Already disappointed, we will always find ourselves disappointed that things are not like before. Any glimpse of the past returning to the present makes us think all is well only to end up disappointed again. Just like seeing a financial investment act bullish again (after so many years of being a bear), we end up thinking we'll be swimming in the returns, only to see the bear swallow everything bull, and the bull turns out to be ****. Worse than a financial investment, a relationship commitment has no unit of measurement for us to use as basis when we compute our returns against our investments. So we can never see just how much we have really lost. Logic cannot play a role because there is no way to show just how much of a bear this commitment has been to us (much to the frustration of friends and family who want us to see the light).
In such a life, we end up letting ourselves drown into a whirlpool of disappointments. If we delude ourselves by thinking that things will get better, we end up swimming in filth while eyeing some unattainable dream that will forever remain out of our grasp.
Caught in the bad investment loop, we can also try to convince ourselves that there is nothing else for us out there. We avoid every turn that is unfamiliar simply because it means leaving what is familiar. Afraid to learn anew, we dwell in a road that teaches us the same lesson day-in and day-out (I.e., I made a mistake, but what else is there for me?).
If we delude ourselves into thinking that things are as good as they'll ever get, then we end up expecting less out of life?-thereby becoming more miserable about living it. When we start thinking that a bad investment (and any investment we question often enough is a bad investment) is already the best we could have (at this point in time), no other investment can appear to us in the horizon?-we end up thinking we can do no better. It's like never leaving a bad job and going for a better one simply because this one sorry job is the only job we know.
Our self-value goes down and we end up letting go of our hopes and dreams, settling with what we have. We become passive with our own life choices. We let a part of ourselves die a little.
The worst part about all this is that when we fall into the bad investment loop, we try to find all sorts of reasons to stay in a relationship that we should most probably end in the first place.
Pascal also wrote, "The heart has reasons of which reason itself does not know." The whole point of seeing darkness or light in the path of life with a lack of faith or armed with faith is that it is not logic that will guide us. We see reasons to go on and reasons to stop because of a way of thinking that escapes logic and, for that matter, reason. If we need to explain why we must stay with someone, we've probably lost the one reason that should and would make us stay.
The ultimate joke here is that so long us we live and think within the bad investment loop we fail to realize that we're trying to use our heads in a relationship that is supposed to be about the heart. Why be logical when logic isn't even a standard? The sad truth is: To think of a relationship's worthwhile-ness in terms of an investment is already to imply that it is not a relationship worth having.
The sad thing about the faith in a bad investment is that until we find something else to believe in, we often cannot change our current path with enough direction to not stray back to what we've already admitted was a mistake. To leave simply because we have lost faith is seldom enough to leave what we have lost and all the dreams that go with it. We need to find a new light to guide us into the darkness if we are to step into territories we've convinced ourselves into believing are worse than leaving the little slice of hell we've been living.
In other words, we need to take another leap of faith that may be equally foolish or far worse than any of our past errors or one of the steps to a life worth investing in.