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As we all know, every story has two sides. While he showed me zero empathy and human decency throughout the breakup, I still want to be respectful to him by adding that I don’t know what he was going through, I don’t know what he was feeling, I only know what he said to me, what he did to me and how his actions and words hurt me deeply. I have spent days, weeks, and months concerned about what he is feeling/ thinking, but when it comes to my writing, it’s me putting myself first.
This night also gets blurry due to the pain and shock (plus the cold and the overstimulating location where it took place). There are parts of the conversation and parts of the night that are not in it either due to privacy or I don’t remember exact sentences of the in-between parts, so I left them out to be fair to him and myself and keep it as short as possible. The sentences said might not be all exact word-to-word, but they mean the same; it is the way I remember them.
…
We left off at Winter Wonderland; the name speaks for itself. It was a magical place, the holidays time, and then there was us, standing still in the middle of rides, full of screaming happy people, eating, drinking, laughing, enjoying themselves…
As I watched him try to form his sentence, his aggression, his hand movements, that moment, I knew what was coming was unlike anything we lived before. I saw how, in an instant, he changed into a completely different person.
A version of him that sometimes appeared when his mask slipped, when I would catch on to some of his action, moments he’d quickly make up for within 12 to 24 hours… But for some reason, this didn’t seem like an appearance. It felt like his mask had finally come off…
I wait for him to finish his sentence.
“No… I… I… am not happy… in this relationship; I haven’t been happy for a while…”
Life stopped around me. I swallowed tears, trying to constrain myself as I felt a knife go through straight through my heart… I felt weak. I felt the knots in my stomach tighten. We could fix this…
“You are not happy? Where is this coming from? I am really sorry you have been feeling unhappy. Can you tell me what is making you unhappy?”
I couldn’t understand. Just a few days ago, he was telling me how happy he was, his friends were talking about how happy he looked, and we had just set plans for the holidays—we had just booked a trip—we were just holding hands…
“I… I… don’t know… I can’t… talk about it… It’s just how I’ve been feeling for a while…”
“Okay, I don’t understand… We were happy… We were fine… Can you please try to explain it to me so we can figure it out?”
“No, you see… This is it… Like you… you… you are just too nice! You want to fix everything… You want to make things better, and you want to calm me down and tell me everything will be okay… You want to convince me we are happy when I tell you I am unhappy, and you want to make it better… And… and… we just can’t… we can’t. I tried…”
Tears started running down my face…
“But you never told me any of this… I am really sorry for snapping, and I am sorry you feel unhappy… Let’s talk about it … Please look at me and talk to me… You can’t just say you tried… We have to try together…”
“No I… I… I… just can’t do this anymore…”
“I don’t understand what you are trying to say. What are you saying?”
I went into shock, unable to digest or understand anything. How can we go from the relationship we had (I thought we had) to this so quickly within minutes…
He grabbed my arm and moved us to the nearest ‘bar’ area… A merry-go-round bar…
He went to get us mulled wine because that would make all of this better. While I stood there crying, trying to get my thoughts together, trying to figure out how to calm him down, how to make this better…
These things happen in relationships. He was going into his avoidant behaviours. He was pushing me away, tired and spiralling… We just needed to calm down, breathe, and talk. He knows I love him, and I know he loves me… You don’t just give up on someone, after everything we shared together, after all the memories… This is rare, the connection we have is rare, you don’t throw it all away on a momentary instance, not like this, not here, not this way…
“I… I… don’t know… Maybe… We need to take a break… It’s just not working. Something isn’t working… I don’t know what… but it’s not.”
My mouth dropped. My vision blurred. A break is a code word for a cowardly break-up.
“I told you at the beginning of this relationship that I don’t believe in breaks if we need time. If you need time, that is fine… if we need to talk about things, that is fine… but a break is just an excuse not to deal with things we should deal with… please please, please don’t ask for that, please don’t ask me for a break… please… I am begging you don’t do this…”
“Fine, then let’s break up… Then… We need to break up.”
The words slipped out of his mouth in the shape of a bunch of the tiniest knives imaginable, and about a gazillion of those little knives flew straight into my heart all at once.
“You don’t mean that… Baby, please… We are in the middle of Winter fucking Wonderland, and you are breaking my heart into pieces. I am begging you, please stop. Please stop what you are doing…”
I lost the strength to keep my body weight up. I lost all awareness… I wasn’t sure if I was breathing, seeing, or if I could hear… The screams, the lights, the crowd, and the reality in front of me were blinding, deafening, breaking me…
How did we get here? 48 hours ago, I was happy and excited… Our relationship was moving forward. Sure, there were hiccups, but nothing I ever thought would be enough to destroy what we were building…
“I have been trying for months…”
“But you haven’t told me anything… You can’t try alone… We are supposed to try together… Just let me understand, please, don’t push me away.”
“See… This is what I mean… You are still trying to understand me… You love too much, you care too much, you are too nice… You are TOO nice to everyone. I’ve never met anyone like you… And it makes me feel not good enough. How you are… makes me feel like something is wrong with me…”
“You promised… You promised that you wouldn’t ever call me too much of something… That is what men use as an excuse for why they are doing the bad thing they are doing or as an excuse as to why they don’t want to be better for you… Like you are doing exactly right now… Please… I am begging you to stop trying to hurt me… There is no going back from any of this… These words…”
“I know whoever we tell this to will say I am fucked up… I know I am fucked up… I know something is wrong with me… The way you love, the way you care makes me feel fucked up… It makes me feel not good enough…”
“I never ever said you aren’t good enough… I never ever thought or felt like you aren’t good enough… I love you…”
“I don’t feel what you feel… I don’t feel madly in love with you… anymore…”
“At least look into my eyes and say this… I know you love me. I know you don’t mean this… Just look at me, please…”
“Look, you are an amazing girlfriend… an amazing person… You are like an angel… You are perfect… too perfect, and I…”
“Just please stop… I am not perfect… No one is perfect… Stop saying all this…”
“You have done things for me that no one has ever done… That is why I tried… but I feel like I love you 60–70% lately… I don’t love you the way you love me… How you love me constantly reminds me that something is wrong with me…”
“Nothing is wrong with you… Love isn’t linear… no one loves anyone, not even their mom or child, the same percentage every day, every moment… it changes. It can fluctuate… love is a choice… You wake up every day choosing to commit and love someone, and what doesn’t change is loving someone. The percentage can change; some days, you can love me 2000 per cent. Some days, 20. Some days, we can be madly in love together, some not as much, but at the end of the day, we love each other and choose each other…”
“You are still trying to convince me this is normal… still trying to make sense of things when I am here telling you I don’t feel the way you do… when I am telling you I don’t want this…”
“Okay, so we love and show in different ways. You don’t have to love in the way I do or show in the way I do… Maybe you love me more, but I show it more… Do you think I love you 100% daily? No… Do you think I am happy all the time? No… No one can love 100% anyone, and nothing can make you feel 100% happy every single second, but you still choose to love, and you choose to keep that person in your life because you do love them and because they make you happy… ”
“Then this is toxic… see basically we are toxic…”
The words break me even more.
“We are not toxic. This is part of being in any relationship… Nothing is linear… It’s all a choice, it’s all an action… We can’t just leave what we have without even trying… No relationship is the same, and just happy all the time… You can’t find one that is perfect and just fun all the time…”
“Well then, maybe I am not meant for a relationship… I run at the sign of unhappiness, which is what I feel…”
I almost drop to the floor. I was losing. I didn’t have the energy anymore. I was trying so hard to hold on while he was trying so hard to let go. He was slipping away; my knees were shaking, I couldn’t hold on alone… But I didn’t want to let go.
Breaking into pieces right in front of his eyes, and he didn’t pause for a second to see the pain he was causing. He watched me cry and break a little more with every word during a conversation that lasted 60 minutes.
A hard lesson I learned too late is… I should have listened to his exact words in the beginning. I should have listened, and rather than stay and try to do right by us alone to fix this for the sake of our relationship, I should have LEFT. When someone is willing to risk losing you, let them. Even if they don’t mean it, it is on them, not you, to convince them otherwise.
When someone doesn’t want to fight for you, for the relationship while you are wasting every part of your existence to fight for it, when someone doesn’t want to be kinder, calmer when someone uses all the good you are (you thought you were) to them against you, when someone sees you break into a gazillion pieces and continues to hurt you without slight remorse. WALK AWAY. Or better yet, LET THEM WALK AWAY. Rather than convince them they love you or that you love them… Love YOURSELF. I forgot to do that while I was trying so hard to love him more.
My ‘mistake’ was that I had spent the last two months reading so much about avoidant attachments that I knew what was happening. I knew he didn’t mean it, and I thought it was my job to get him to see it. While I went into an entirely anxious mode, trying to help our relationship securely, I was anxiously trying not to lose the man I loved. I was anxiously trying to hold on as he was letting me go. The hard truth is he had already let me go.
I don’t regret trying to hold on to the love I thought I had, but I do regret staying and putting myself through those words and that pain…
Click here for The Breakup Part 1 (ch.3)
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
