I thought about writing just these words as the entire blog:
Date and marry only people with personality disorders. You will never miss them. Period.
But, I’ll try to write something a little more meaningful than that.
I just got broken up with, recently. It was not tragic, yet it was hard. There were a lot of signs that something had been going on, and for months. I had no idea what it was, but I knew that something was awry and I was not privy to the information. He had been working really hard to find fault, find something, somewhere, that I had done to justify himself. He breached my trust by listening to and reading voice messages…and there was nothing.
I tried to divorce my husband of 25+ years amicably almost three years ago now. That didn’t go as planned and it just today…hopefully…over. He, in the end, had been going through my phone records as well, going through my journals-even demanded that they be turned in during the divorce case, itself. He was trying really hard to justify himself as well.
Both of these men had mental health diagnosis-one treated and one untreated. Of course, I didn’t know that when I first met them, or even for the first year we had been together, or married.
One of my daughters broke up with her boyfriend of over four years last fall. Then my other two daughters’ boyfriends broke up with them. We endured a few months of a hot mess, here, to say the least.
Observing these different break-ups, and my daughters and my responses to them, I thought I’d share. There were some things that I noticed that might be valuable to someone, somewhere.
My daughter and I both broke off long-term relationships. During these relationships, we both had changed. We had learned to morph into the needed personalities and “perform” as we should. We were not ourselves. At the end of our relationships, before we broke it off, there were key things that happened.
- We noticed how the relationship has changed us-how resent, anger, irritations, and pettiness had entered. I noticed how physically ill and anxious I had become as well.
- We both noticed that we had not been our best selves with these men. And there was no way to return to or even evolve into that “self” inside that limited space.
These are the signs that both she and I had that we, personally, were in unhealthy places. I realized that I had not been happy for decades, that I was simply “punting” each day, trying to roll with the stresses of my supposedly chosen life with him.
All of us in the house noticed my daughter pulling away from her boyfriend, not spending as much time with him as before, not being as thoughtful as she had been before, and starting to say negative things about him. This was not normal for her. I had done the same thing.
By the time she and I both decided that these relationships needed to be over, we had not only fallen out of love with them but with ourselves, entirely. We had become someone we were not proud of.
However, we had done our best. Her losses were quite simple to cut. Mine were not. Her boyfriend left her life without a show of rage and without slandering her name to the world. He left quietly and peacefully. We all were quite sad. We all loved him.
My loss-cutting was nearly impossible. I have written about this extensively in my “Wild Edge of Love” series. There was simply nothing to miss. I didn’t miss his anger and leaving in the middle of all of our conversations. I didn’t miss his coming into the house, uninvited, to shuffle through all of my paperwork in search of what, I don’t know. I didn’t miss the very, very self-serving sex. I didn’t miss him sitting on his ass, reading, and not participating in our lives. Nothing to miss there, my friends.
By the time it was done…it was done.
My daughter, just last weekend, told me that during the first month that she broke up with her boyfriend, she let herself miss him. She let herself remember all of the their shared memories and feel the sadness. And when the month was over, it was over. Done.
Sure, she took the time to miss him. Maybe a month is enough. Sometimes a day is enough. Sometimes, we just don’t miss them at all.
Did I miss and do I miss the man who broke up with me two months ago? The “missing him” phase was fast and furious. He broke up with me on a Sunday, and Tuesday we met up to exchange things from each other’s houses. I had cried quite a lot, those days between.
But, when I find out that he had cheated on me, and it had been eating at him, and all of the dis-ease that I had felt and seen in the relationship pointed back to that very moment in time, I was done missing him. I missed him and the idea of his companionship for exactly two days.
He wasn’t mine anyway. The lies are enough to keep me from missing him. My ex-husband was the same. The lies were enough. The lies I told myself to stay married, the lies about who he was, about what he wanted for our life together, about how he would continue to be part of our lives in a positive way. The lies were eternal and endless.
I knew I would miss being held. I knew I was a little scared of living out here, in the middle of nowhere, without some sleepovers. It’s always been a hard thing to live out here, even when I was married. The ex-husband was often gone at night.
I found that having an inquisitive and critical mind around a relationship helps me not to miss them. Yes, there are legit heartbreaks. I have gone through one very severe case of heartbreak in my life. But, when the grief is balanced with the price I had paid in my life, the heartbreak quickly dissipates into the ether.
Being curious and critical-not skeptical-helps to process things along the way. Try to keep your eyes wide open.
During the first few months, this is impossible. But, try…just try.
When break-ups involve court hearings, it’s hard to miss exes. When break-ups involve not seeing our kids, we miss the kids. But we don’t miss the exes.
We might miss what that relationship represented. We might miss what it looked like to the world around us-the facade of “perfect family”-ness.
Being honest with ourselves is key. It wasn’t perfect. It was deeply flawed. We were not fulfilled, nor were we happy. We were not getting what we needed and we are better off now. And that’s just the part about us.
They, the exes, were not happy either. He would never have admitted it to me. But then again, there is this honesty thing. And he wasn’t quite clued in about how that went. They were not getting what they needed. They are better off now. At least mine is.
We both are getting what we need.
He got his freedom, his money, and a playmate.
I got my kids and the potential for a fulfilling life. I got the possibility of being loved for who I am, for the first time.
Yeah, we will miss them. But using our “thinking” minds all along the way will help when it falls apart. It will make sense. Our hearts will have less work to do that way. Heartbreaks and breakups will never be easy, but looking at things honestly will take the edge off, to be sure.
PS. Throw in the need for a restraining order or two, and that edge doesn’t exist anymore;)
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
 White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism |
 Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box |
 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
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Photo credit: Jackson Simmer on Unsplash
