My Year of Magical Thinking

At the beginning of 2005, I entered into a relationship with a boy. At the end of 2010, he ended it. He’d started a relationship with somebody else and, having given the matter careful consideration, decided he preferred what his paramour had to offer him.

He presented this information to me as a fait accompli. There was to be no discussion, no negotiation. It was his decision to make, he said, and he had made it. There was nothing I could do to change his mind.

So that was it: betrayed, blindsided and booted out of his life in a nanosecond. He left the following morning and we have never spoken since.

The shock was obliterative, unbearably monstrous. I could not conceive at any level — emotional, logical, psychological — how someone I trusted and believed was innately good, innately decent, was also capable of behaving like an adulterous cad; that he was, in fact, a cad.

I was spat out, catapulted onto new, unwelcome terrain. A blackness descended upon my life. He had destroyed everything I knew to be true. “It will be OK,” he assured me that night. It wasn’t. It wasn’t for many years. Every day was a struggle to stay alive.

2011 was my year of magical thinking.

…

“A single person is missing, and the whole world is empty.”

He had been planning it for a while, he said. For months, actually.

The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Those who love us sometimes desire to wound us. But if someone is indifferent, what they demonstrate is a total lack of care.

The analytical mind turns to questions of why. They’ve gone — and what we need most of all to understand is why? Not why me, necessarily. But why this?

I wanted to know what had been going through his mind. How he justified what he had done, or didn’t. I may not have known everything about him, but I did know something. I couldn’t reconcile the different parts of him.

Yet I never wished for an excoriating confrontation. The scale of my devastation meant no explanation he could offer would satisfy me. And I doubted he even knew himself. His deeper motives would be his burden to carry; they didn’t have to be mine as well.

All the while, I missed him still. Not the person he’d turned out to be, but the person I thought he was.

And in the assessment of what had happened, there was little hope of lessening the agony.

…

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

You see the pity in the eyes of well-meaning people. There but for the grace of God go I. But there is judgment there, too. And offers of help, sincerely made, mask a curiosity. You really didn’t know? Or: being so openly devastated makes you look like a victim. Or: there must be something about you which is easy to leave behind.

Any attempt to put a brick wall around the overwhelming sense of annihilation I felt, was useless. I felt that way for a very long time. It was all-consuming.

I wasn’t the man he wanted. He wanted someone else. It was unimaginable, for all I wanted was him and I thought I already had him.

…

“It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.”

Eight months after he left, I cried properly for the first time. I had been making it into work, but I was barely eating and I was barely sleeping, and it was three AM in the kitchen and I sat down next to the ironing board which had been standing right in the middle of the room for months now, and I could see no future for myself which didn’t involve suffering.

How could he do this to me?

Yet I wasn’t the prime motivating factor in his behaviour. I had been once, maybe. But not really.

Some people who suffer betrayal and abandonment blame themselves. It makes a sort of sense to do so. There is, after all, no more personal a rejection. But I didn’t find myself afflicted by that particular pathology. I preferred the view that some people are more prone to those sorts of behaviours than others, that a lot of what people do stems from their childhood, or from compulsions learned elsewhere.

What I couldn’t come to terms with was having let one of those people into my life. I never once felt disgusting. What I felt was disgust.

…

“They lost concentration. “After a year I could read headlines,” I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before.”

I look back and think how much time I lost. All the books I could have read. All the stuff I could have travelled to see. I was no longer paying for him, so I had money to burn.

Yet I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than him. That he likely wasn’t thinking of me at all made no difference. I knew the folly of pining for an absent figure. Why go on loving someone who doesn’t love you back? I did it anyway.

I started to see how little he had given me of his life, how carefully managed the information he made available to me had been. This somehow made an already dire predicament desparate.

I had intertwined my life with his. I just didn’t see his reluctance to intertwine his with mine.

…

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal.”

I resented the unilateral nature of his conduct, and the enduring psychological problem it created for me. Relationships require reciprocity. In the absence of reciprocity there is only selfishness.

I thought we were a team. I thought we were in partnership. In fact, he was secretly building a new life, apparently in full view. I just hadn’t noticed.

I thought we operated in unison. In fact, we were two stories running alongside one another which never managed to align or converge.

I remained reluctant to condemn him. He hadn’t set out to destroy me, I told myself, or even to hurt me. He had behaved badly, but he wasn’t a bad person. But I came to realise that what he did was cruel. And it made him look like a user, like someone who extracts what they want from a person, then moves on, like someone who diminishes the spirit of others, like someone capable of duplicity. Eventually, I had to face the possibility it was more than mere likeness, that actually I had been used.

The calibre of an ending matters, because bad endings have a way of tarnishing all the good that went before them.

Many things are dispensable: people shouldn’t be. Why did he get to decide we had run our course? Why was that exclusively his decision to make? What had all our efforts been for? What had happened to our shared goals? Was I to be denied even the sense of reaching a proper end? Was there not a methodology which didn’t involve pulling the rug out from under me?

…

“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

I never once thought it was reversible. Even if he had come running back with his tail between his legs begging my forgiveness, I could not countenance readmitting someone like that into my life.

That is why it felt like a death. I was grieving the man I thought he always had been. The person he turned out to be I wanted nothing to do with at all.

And perhaps that is why Joan Didion’s magnificent grief memoir — The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) — spoke to me so powerfully, then and still now.

…

Niall Stewart is the author of The Beautiful Anatomy of Despair (2022)