This is the thing about girls who don’t believe they’re good enough for certain guys. A girl can spend her entire life being just average. Good grades, fine at sports, just pretty enough, but they’ve never been perfect. It’s a thing they come to accept about themselves. So when a man comes by who is always three steps ahead of the girl in everything they do and they declare their love for the girl, she’s lost. She’s hooked Adonis and she doesn’t know how. The man tells them they’re perfect and they can’t accept that about themselves because they’ve always been just enough. The man’s love for them buoys them up to a level they’ve never been at before but even then they know they’re on a pedestal, not standing on their own two feet. No matter how perfect the man tells them they are they can’t believe it about themselves, and it hurts. It hurts to be a star in someone’s eyes when you can’t see it in yourself. So they become bitter in their bliss. They let the knowledge that they’ll never see what he sees in them boil inside them. Fester. And they do petty childish things in their bitterness. It becomes a part of them, and then an opinion about them until petty bitterness consumes them. And people who said all along that she was never good enough for him start to sound like prophets instead of jealous liars. Then they are lost. And the man notices, he holds her at arms length and sees she is no longer the person he fell in love with. He sees her self-consciousness is now a consuming reality and he doesn’t know what to do. He shares with her what he feels and is clawed to pieces by accusations and resentment. The vows he made to always love her wring him dry. Do they still apply if the person has changed? If they’re no longer the person he fell in love with? He doesn’t believe it. He leaves not a wife, but a stranger. And the stranger who was once a star in someone’s eyes is average again and she breaks herself down. She tells herself she was right and she was never good enough for him. She doesn’t recognize how much she’s changed. She doesn’t see how she squashed her angelic qualities with self-deprecation. She couldn’t avoid it, and neither could he. To ride on someone’s coattails who is always larger than you makes you smaller than you ever were before.