From Strangers to Friends, From Friends Into Lovers Then Strangers Again

I have been struggling with my breakup, going through a constant flow of intermittent feelings that range from ‘I am queen of the earth I deserve better and I’m doing great’ to ‘there must be something wrong with me, where did I mess up, do I even deserve love’. Basically, I am on what feels like an endless road towards insanity, or something like it.

The interesting thing is that there is truly no rule that allows you to preventively know which You you will wake up with, the superhero or the helpless girl looking for love. That said, after a massive migraine where I threw up lots of the pain I had inside I am now in this new mid way state where I still can think of little else but I can get a couple of hours of work done on an average day. I can make it to the gym and also eat the cookies.

No contact for two and a half weeks. For the life of me I cannot figure out how someone can go from ‘please call me as soon as the Uber driver takes you home and you’ve locked your door upstairs’ to ‘I don’t care if you’re dead or alive’ within the space of a minute.

I also cannot understand how you can go from ‘on our next vacation let’s spend two weeks barefoot on a boat’ to ‘right then, I’m gonna have to end this’ with nothing at all happening in between these two sentences, but okay.

Welcome to breakups my friends. Do they teach you at school not to care or are some people simply born with it?

I found a song that sums it up perfectly by Solange:

‘Isn’t it strange?

I am still me

You are still you

In the same place

Isn’t it strange

How people can change

From strangers to friends

From friends into lovers

And strangers again’.

That’s exactly what I am thinking as I sit here and wonder what went wrong.

‘He has issues, he’s unable to be in a relationship at age 47’ is the script that those around me repeat over and over for me to memorize. Yet I cannot seem to find peace.

Could I have done something different? Could the reason be another? Did he simply not like me enough? As I ask myself this I stare in the mirror and wonder why, once again, I ruined my hair and died it four times in a month only for it to end up in a yellowish blonde mess.

Current status: +2 Kg in 2 weeks, hair color — yellow.

Could that be the reason it ended?

Obviously I did what any sane person in this situation would do: I turned to the all-knowing voice of Google (and read numerous articles by you, my fellow Medium bloggers).

This technique allowed me to come up with 5 possible scenarios, all of which are plausible, however I would love to know what you think.

5 possible reasons why he/she left you:

He/she is avoidant: his/her attachment style made him/her move away when you actually started having feelings for each other. (I am a lot to be fair, a sparkling ball of love, trait which doesn’t help if this is the most plausible scenario). The closer you get, the further they will run in an attempt not to feel pain. Ever. (As if that was even your intent in the first place…)
He/she is a narcissist: I read all about this recently and promise to write about it. Basically you are not even in their thoughts. You are just something they toyed with to fulfill their needs for love and attention. You are their fuel for self esteem. When they break you in, they can leave. Great.
He/she is just not that into you: maybe they realized they simply didn’t like you enough. Which seems strange considering his actions to win you over but sure, maybe they discovered you weren’t what they were looking for. Maybe what they are looking for doesn’t even exist in real life, who knows.
They met someone else: I have no indication that this is the case, however it could well be. In some cases it’s so obvious in others you’d never suspect it.
They are (simply put) an asshole. My dad said it best in my case: if at 47 you know you have a problem due to which you keep hurting others and you do nothing to fix it, you are an asshole. Could they have embarked into this with no actual intention to see it through even if they told you the exact opposite? This to me seems like the most plausible explanation today, however I do tend to dip in between 1–3 on good and bad days.

What do you think?

Truth is, it really doesn’t matter why this person left you.

The only thing that matters is that they did. They chose a life without you and the only thing this narrative is useful for is for our brains which are not designed to function in a state of uncertainty, so we need a narrative we believe in to be able to put this behind us and move on.

The ‘he just wasn’t that into you’ narrative, which unfortunately always feels like the easiest to adopt as being true, is the hardest for me to accept. I usually pick the opposite one: he was scared of so much love. Is it bullshit? Who knows, but it helps me to think of it this way because I don’t hate the person, I almost pity him. It makes me feel more like me to choose this narrative because in order to move on I need to wish him well, and in all the other versions I detest him.

My sister-in-law-to-be says that when you are a good person with truly good intentions at heart you cannot put yourself in the brain of someone who is more selfish or has anything other than purely good intentions at heart. I have a feeling this could be the case as well.

Maybe we feel we must find a narrative for closure, even if deep inside we know it doesn’t matter and it’s probably not the full or the true story of why it happened. So what if we script our own narrative? It’s for no one else but ourselves (and for our close friends who each have their own version of why this happened to make sense of the un-makeable sense of situation).

In reality all we truly need is acceptance. Acceptance that this breakup happened, as shocking as it may be. Acceptance that we are once again, on our own.

Or maybe all we need is a reason to find the strength to do what we have all done before: pick up the pieces, put them back together in a more solid, a more beautiful way than before this new round of shattering.

Once again we must get back up and keep going, as we are, heart in hand, knowing that something better and more deserving will come our way.

…

If you want to get the full story, you can read it at:

Should we dare to dream or prepare for a potential crash?

How not to let your past fuck up your future.

Why avoidant partners make us feel like we are the problem

Let’s not ruin everything.

Is it Love or Love Bombing?

Have you ever heard of the ‘surprise breakup’?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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