I avoided my couch for months. I wouldn’t sit on it, even looking at it was an ugly, brown, leather, reminder. I knew which cushion still smelled like him, and I knew the exact spot we had sat when I had seen him last. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t sit on that couch.
Around April, my boyfriend of ten months broke up with me. Like many university students, I was in a long distance relationship. In hindsight, I can see each red flag I had ignored and justified. “Well, he’s just busy. He can’t text me on Valentine’s day because he’s busy”. Yikes. I was completely blind. He changed quickly, and I cut him endless amounts of slack, feeling like I deserved it for my apprehension at the beginning of our relationship.
I knew something wasn’t right, and it was eating away at me, forcing me to come to the conclusion that I was doing something terribly wrong. It was the only answer I could come up with, and I used it as motivation to be an even better girlfriend. Friends urged me to break up with him. My family suggested he needed space. I did what I could, silencing my own worries, hoping to keep my stresses separate from his own. I gave him space, knowing if I were in his position, I would like to be treated with kindness and love, a support system there when he needed.
By Easter weekend, I had had enough. It was no longer a relationship: everything we had been was slowly disintegrating, becoming part of the past, despite all of my efforts. He had sent me a text message, saying, “Have a good Easter Em!” (Pretty sure my uncle sent me the exact same text) but clearly closing any hope of further communication. While I remained available to him, he shut down on me. In a desperate attempt to fix the situation, I called one of our mutual friends. She told me, that he had spoken to her saying, “It gets easier and easier to see less of her”. What I had been questioning for so long had been confirmed. I called him, and he broke up with me. He harshly told me, he didn’t love me, and that he didn’t want to be in a relationship
I was so hopelessly confused, so much of what he told me did not add up. Weeks before, he told me how I meant the world to him. Promised to come see me when classes had finished for the summer. He had been the one who initially sought me out, eager to start a relationship with me. I had been unsure, worried about his past relationships in which he demonstrated characteristics that were less than ideal. I took a leap of faith, believing that I was different in his eyes. That he would treat me with respect and kindness that he had not shown to others.
I know that with all relationships, it’s between two people. I cannot say that this is completely his fault, that I played no part within this equation. What I do know, is that I deserved so much more respect than what I was given. There are circumstances in which you have to remove yourself from an unhealthy situation. But in this case, I was kind and supportive and in return, I was given a couple of lies and the cold shoulder.Â
I will never be able to understand what happened. The avoidance and cowardice that accompanied his method of breaking up with me is one of the cruelest ways to say goodbye to a person. I was forced to come up with my own conclusions, filling in the blanks that were not provided.
I managed to get through my final exams with the hope that I could speak to him afterwards, to understand what had gone wrong. Cutting off all communication with someone I had spent so much of my time and thoughts on, seemed silly to me. I’ve always been the type of person to see the best in others, and I knew that I could at maintain a friendship with him. I composed an email, which allowed me to finally get out what I wanted to say and ask. There was never a response. A week later, he had a new girlfriend.
My hope is that someone who goes through a similar situation, reads this, and feels like they’re not alone. Because I know, when someone breaks up with you, you feel like you’re the only person in the world that is feeling that way. It’s isolating and terrifying, and you have to learn how to create new habits that don’t involve that person anymore. As clichĂ© as it may sound, your friends are going to be the ones to help you get through it. They’ll be there to force feed you ice cream and let you sob on their shoulder. They’ll tell you other break up stories that are horrendous and funny ( “he came back a year later, sobbing on her front porch”). And then one day, you’ll sit back on your couch and think, thank God it didn’t work out.Â