Love over Career or Career over Love?

How convenient that I should find these photos of me working at Workplays just a day after I've contemplated my decisions in life so far.

I recently watched a Filipino movie - OMG, shocker, I know... but I've been watching a lot of those lately - in which the main characters struggle with the big question: Choice A (love over career) or Choice B (career over love).

Funnily enough, I've been a Choice B girl all my life. In fact, it caused the downfall of quite a few of my past relationships. How many times had I heard the phrase, "You never have time for me anymore"? Or "You're too in the zone, you're not even listening to me anymore"? Or "No matter how busy you are, it only takes 5 seconds to reply to a text"? Or, my favorite: "You're always on your phone when we're together"?

Maybe it was my fault for always choosing boys who didn't have any real career goals - boys who flitted from one job to another because they couldn't make up their minds and boys who couldn't keep stable jobs because of bad decisions.

Either way, I refused to apologize for being so career-oriented. I blamed them for the reasons in the paragraph above and I got angry at them for not understanding how my work life works when really, all I needed to do was compromise and find a good middle ground. I never cheated so openly the way some of my exes did; but I was never the perfect girlfriend, either.

I never regretted my decision to choose work over love before, though, even after I lost those boys one by one. After all, I told myself: work pays the bills. Work pays for my daughter's tuition. And work will never break my heart... or so I thought.

But it did once. And when I was at my lowest point, thinking that I might even lose my job because of my mental issues (read more about that here); I lay in bed at night, crying, with no one to turn to. And that's when I realized that maybe Choice B isn't a good choice, after all.

Now, that doesn't go to say that you should choose love over career, either. I've done that once, too - when I was young, blind and stupid. And we all know how things turned out with the babydaddy (read more about that here).

Perhaps the ideal thing to do is not to choose love or career at all. Choose choice C, so to speak. Choose your friends. Choose your family. Choose God. Choose your passion. Choose yourself. Choose something... anything, really, that has nothing to do with love or a career to keep you sane.

And when you create your circle of friends, make sure they're loyal and worth keeping. When you choose God, do it wholeheartedly and selflessly. When you improve yourself, do things that make you happy. When you stay at a job, choose one that you would love and fight for. And when you look for love, build it from a solid foundation of friendship and trust.

Eventually, finding that middle ground will become second nature to you and everything will fall into place. Tiwala.