Is It Relational Trauma, or Are They Just Not That Into You?

It’s 4 am on New Year’s Day, and I’m in a hostel in London talking to a girl I met twelve hours ago. She’s visiting the UK, and the plan was to meet up with her boyfriend in Germany later that week.

Then she found out he’d cheated.

“He really does seem sorry,” she says. But she’s a decade older than me, and I can tell she’s jaded. “The feminist in me doesn’t want to take him back. But I flew all the way here. I don’t know what to do.”

I tell her that this all sounds far too familiar. “What happened to you?” she asks.

I tell her that he was head over heels for me, but felt that he wasn’t good enough and was terrified that he’d mess things up. Then we had to go long-distance, and he went cold on me. Told me that he didn’t want anything serious and never said he did. But, when I told him he had hurt me, he’d seemed genuinely remorseful. And that now, I didn’t know whether to stay loyal or walk away.

She looks at me dubiously. “Girl, that doesn’t really sound like a relationship to me. Sounds like he just didn’t like you that much.”

I wince, and in my head think, she doesn’t know the full story. I’m about to insist that, no, there’s more to it. But I stop myself, because that’s what deluded girls tell themselves to deny the reality that they’re getting played.

…

They always tell you that if a guy likes you, you’ll know.

I’ve never liked this advice. Maybe in part because it’s too hard of a pill for me to swallow. But I like to think it’s more so because it’s too simplistic.

The rule implies that people are always capable of treating each other with kindness. If you’ve ever lived a single day on this planet, you probably know that this is rarely the case.

We’ve all been hurt. So much of human behavior is driven by pain, fear, and sometimes even trauma. It’s why we self-sabotage when we start to feel happy. Why we lash out at our loved ones. And, why we often can’t just will ourselves into doing better in our relationships, no matter how much we may care for the other person.

Luckily, when I started what I thought would be my first real relationship, I knew I didn’t have to worry about any of this. He was straightforward, honest, and more into me than I was into him. We had those talks that’d stretch into the early hours of the morning, where we’d both reveal our fears and insecurities. He was a little bruised, but that just reassured me that he wouldn’t hurt me in the same ways that he’d been hurt.

Then a few months later, I moved abroad. And in came the hot and cold, the empty reassurances that everything was fine, and eventually the aggressive denials that he ever made a commitment to me.

“I don’t know what I want. I don’t know if I need space.”

“I’m not trying to avoid you. I’m sorry. I’m just kinda off.”

“From where I’m standing, your expectations of me feel unreasonable.”

They always tell you that if a guy likes you, you’ll know.

I would always chalk it up to past relational trauma: being picked on in elementary school for being autistic, not having many friends until college due to social anxiety, being cheated on throughout all three years of his first relationship.

It was, without question, the explanation for the anxious-avoidant attachment style; the stonewalling; and the fears of intimacy, vulnerability, and commitment. And of course, the reason why he felt weak and unmanly for showing emotion.

Maybe it’s a female thing, but I couldn’t stop that reflex for seeing the best in him.

I wasn’t just that, though — I inevitably saw myself in him, too.

I know what it’s like to be horrible to the ones you love most. I know what it’s like to see yourself as a monster, as someone who doesn’t deserve to take up space in this world — and to know that those feelings aren’t just distorted self-perceptions, but are very legitimate evaluations based on having done tangible harm to others.

And, I know what it feels like to be demonized and abandoned for all that behavior.

It’s why instead of writing him off as some asshole, I’d give second chances on second chances.

…

From 3500 miles away, I did everything I could.

I reached out. Gave him weeks of space. Gave him an ultimatum. Apologized when that pissed him off. Sent him lighthearted memes. Gave him more space. Begged him for communication. Apologized again for being needy. Tried to act like everything was normal.

I handled him with kid gloves. It didn’t help. No matter what I tried, I didn’t make much progress. There were blips of hope, closely followed by dives of despair.

While waiting for a response, I’d torment myself with advice I’d get from Reddit and Quora:

“If it’s real love, it’ll come easy.”

“If you’re getting mixed signals, it means no.”

“If you’re the one, he’ll step up for you.”

None of it sat right with me. When a person sleeps fourteen hours a day because they’ve got depression, we don’t tell their friends and family, “If they love you enough, they’ll find it in themselves to get out of bed.”

At the same time, I felt like a failure of a woman for not being the one to motivate him to overcome his fears and do the hard thing. One thought starts nagging at me: Maybe I really wasn’t anything more than just a quick lay for him.

But at this point, I don’t know what to trust, so I consult my best friend. I fill him in on the latest batch of cryptic texts:

“It’s okay, you can talk to me. You’re not a burden.”

“I’m sorry I missed your message. Please text me tomorrow, I’ll make the time.”

“I don’t have extra time for this. School and work are my priorities. I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.”

He mulls them over.

“Look, I think you’re looking too into things. It sounds like he just wasn’t that interested in you.”

There’s nothing I can say without sounding like a fool.

…

My time abroad ends without much improvement. Towards the end, I somehow find it in myself to cut off contact.

Then, a few weeks later, I get a Venmo payment.

Literally, a Venmo payment. I’d blocked him on everything, but forgot about Venmo. At the top of my transaction history is a one-cent offering, accompanied by a hefty memo. Yes, this sounds like the makings of a viral Twitter thread.

I can’t help concluding, if he reached out to me over a payment app, he must really want to talk to me.
With the door cracked open, he gets a foot in.

“I missed talking to you. I don’t like talking to that many people but I often find myself wanting to share things with you.”

I perk up. It’s a different tone. His words are less defensive. Softer.

The door is still locked, but I crack it open a bit more and peek over the chain. It’s the last thing keeping me safe.

I scroll down. Then, I get the answer to the dilemma that has consumed me for months:

“I shouldn’t have shut you out.”

“You were right to call me out all those times.”

“I pushed you away because I was afraid of getting hurt.”

It was all finally starting to make sense. Everyone who’d told me that he was a jerk and that I was blind had no clue what they were talking about. I hadn’t just been looking at him through rose-tinted glasses — I’d been right all along.

I keep reading. Eventually, I come across the words that I’d been dreaming of hearing for so long:

“I realize that I haven’t maintained our relationship well and it’s something I want to work on. I wasn’t fair to you and you didn’t deserve any of it. I have a lot of regrets about the things I’ve said and the way I’ve treated you.

And when I say I regret something, I don’t do it to make myself feel better. I’m doing it to acknowledge that I understand I’ve wronged you so you know I see it, validate your reaction to it, and want to do better.”

So, I unlock the door.

…

Over the next year, we rebuild our relationship. We did a lot to work through some of the scars from his past. With time, he became more willing to step out of his comfort zone, be vulnerable, and go out of his way to do things that he knew were important to me.

There were talks about eventually meeting each other’s parents. He invited me to hang out with some of his friends, even though it still made him uneasy. Said that he was afraid of when all this would have to end.

“I wish I was ready for this sooner.”

“I’m afraid that if you aren’t around, I’ll put the walls back up.”

“I’m becoming a better person, and you’re the reason it’s possible.”

Maybe I really was “the one” — the girl special enough to help him heal. The reason he chose to be better.

I started to feel like things might finally be okay.

Then, it was his turn to move abroad. And it happened again.

The texting slowed. In came the “everything’s okay”s when I asked if anything was wrong. That quickly turned into him insisting that from the beginning, he’d made it clear that this wasn’t anything long-term.

“We’ve had this conversation a million times, and you just never listen. It’s always the same script with you.”

“Every moment I spend with you feels like time wasted from working towards my goals.”

“Honestly? You really don’t make my life that much better.”

That frightening, stern tone came back. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get those sweet words back.

Like clockwork, he clammed up.

Just like that, everything we’d been working towards came crashing down. We were back to square one. It was like the past year had never happened.

I hardly recognized him, yet he was more familiar than ever.

…

While the last year was a blessing in so many ways, it also wasn’t entirely healthy.

During that time, my entire personality became being nice, understanding, forgiving, and endlessly empathetic. I was obsessed with emotionally martyring myself for the self-actualization of a boy. I developed a sick fantasy that one day, when he’d talk about me to his friends and family in private, he’d admit, “She was the only girl who didn’t give up on me.”

I made sure to hardly ask for anything so as not to overwhelm him. Because after all, every good woman gives unconditionally… right?

But in retrospect, I’ve spent the past three years of my life being a mother, not a girlfriend.

There’s a lot of shame in writing that. Girls like me are the butt of Instagram memes where the punchline is the woman insisting, “He’s different around me,” or, “I can fix him.” They make entire movies off us, where Ginnifer Goodwin over analyzes her dates’ behaviors and Justin Long has to tell her, “If a guy wants to be with a girl, he will make it happen — no matter what.”

It’s been three years. Three patchy years. A situationship, an entanglement — call it what you what.

I’ve spent the past three years of my life being a mother, not a girlfriend.

All that time, this question of past trauma or lack of interest has haunted me. But recently, I’ve found myself wondering…

…does it really matter?

If our needs aren’t getting met in a relationship, then does it really matter whether that’s due to the other person’s inability rather than their unwillingness to meet those needs?

Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much someone claims they care about you if you can’t feel that care.

…

In a weird way, where we stand is even more uncertain now than it was when things first turned so messy all those years ago. But every few months or so, I get that reassurance:

“I do care about you.”

“You really helped me become more open and vulnerable. I made a lot of progress because of you.”

“You really are important to me.”

Like a birthday duty call to your grandma.

I’ve got 289 notes in the folder on my phone named with his first initial. Each of them is perfectly crafted, designed to hit home in all the right places so that he’ll finally fully step up.

I don’t know which of those I’ll end up sending in response to the next check-in. I just wonder how much longer it’ll take for me to genuinely not want to send anything at all.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

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