The Past Tense

No, you’re right, I’m not the person you thought I was.

Perhaps I’m not even the person I thought I was. But I’m on a journey, you see. There is nothing I can do about it. A journey is destiny and my destiny is to 100% commit to the journey right now.

I’m not sure what the destination is but it seems like it’s an internal destination. I will just know. I mean I will know when I’ve arrived. But I don’t have a map or a place in mind at the moment. Clearly I am far away from knowing much of anything.

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I do know this: it has nothing to do with you. And I know you thought everything had to do with you but that’s not true and it probably never was. I share responsibility for boosting your ego to think that it was all about you. I’m sorry. That was wrong of me.

So that’s another reason it didn’t work, on top of everything else. Everything else being you. I’m joking, kind of. In all fairness, there’s ME. When you were more interested in meeting your own needs to the exclusion of mine, and I told you then I asked you about yours, and was told to get your organic food because it is a pandemic, I did. But I noticed you never asked me about my needs and if they were being fulfilled. I told you anyway.

When we broke up and you finally left, you texted me, as if to accuse me of wronging YOU, “I loved you.” But when you wrote that, you see, at that moment, I still loved you. Stupidly, unable to stop myself, or seemingly so. It hit me and ouch. I just looked at the words on the screen for a long long time. I was at work. The finality set in.

The past tense.

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I didn’t respond, not to you.

But I wrote to me in my journal.I ripped off the band-aid and accepted the past tense of YOU. I had already been working through the past tense of US, the couple. By the time I received your text, I had already realized, but not yet dealt with, the terrible truth: there may have been an US at one time but that was a brief and fleeting phase. My therapist gave me props for that. But again I have to take responsibility:

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What I thought I wanted or needed in this life was a partner. You showed up and it seemed so right and even though neither of us was/is perfect, we were perfect together ….or I or we both thought so.

The clues were endless and they started with “our book.” I bought this large, expensive, handmade lovely blank scrapbook where we could write goals, document our lives together and even dream a little, as the “book of us.” We did our numerology in there and we found out that we were compatible based on our birthdates and birth times. That was very cool. It’s all in there.

But you never wanted to write in the book.

You said it was my book but it was not my book. I may have bought it but it was our book and in it we were supposed to create an artifact of US that we could look back on after a long life together.

I still have the book. I thought about burning it,but I didn’t. I did destroy the beautiful wedding and engagement pictures. May they rot in peace in whatever landfill they ended up in.

Why did you want to get married if you can’t even write in the book? Let me reframe this question: “Why would you marry someone who wouldn’t write in the book?” Why did I accept that, when it was so important to me? I messed up. (Honestly your reasons are also messed up, about the marriage, but I’m over thinking about you.) I can only work on me. Accountability, y’all. It’s amazing. It’s helping me heal.

Part of my journey is knowing I have to be extremely honest with myself. Even if we had love in the past tense, my expectation that you actually wanted a lifelong partnership was wrong. I get it now, years later. Your actions told me this even if your words didn’t. And I pushed you to go to couples therapy. No wonder it never happened, because, as I wrote in our book, “you cannot force someone to do something they do not want to do.” I didn’t want to nag you. Is it because writing it down is too much commitment? Getting legally married is not? BTW, divorce is expensive and painful; there is NO WAY I am doing that again.

One year after the breakup, six months post-divorce and eight — 8! — years since you waltzed into my world and became the center of it, I can freely admit that I made the biggest mistakes. I didn’t want to see. I overlooked the signs in the hope that we would grow into this partnership. Because maybe I wanted a partner that badly? Of course it sounds naive, all this hope. In hindsight, it is so clear: this is not how it works. Hope and love are not enough when the commitment was not there.

…

On this journey I can only look back to learn and apply these lessons to my future. My manifesto to present and future self is simple:

I promise myself to never overlook red flags.
I promise myself to be the best partner I never had.
I now have a new book, my new post-divorce diary. I promise that we will continue to write in there all the time, documenting the journey, the dreams and goals.

As someone said recently, “As long as you have breath, change is possible.”

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Alayne Unterberger is my real name, but you can follow me at @DrAlayne here on Medium.com. I write on a variety of topics such as health, mental health, travel, immigration and sometimes fiction. I welcome your feedback.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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