Her Campus Logo Her Campus Logo
Girl sad at night
Girl sad at night
Photo by Garon Piceli from Pexels
Pace | Wellness > Sex + Relationships

I Kept Trying To Understand Him. I Never Stopped To Ask If I Still Loved Him.

Danielle Cox Student Contributor, Pace University
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Pace chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

There’s a version of insanity everyone quotes: doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. For years, I thought that was my diagnosis. Same guy, same disappearing act, same me, showing back up like clockwork, punctual as ever — honestly, the most consistent I’ve ever been about anything in my life. Insane, right? Except I’ve realized that’s not actually what I was doing. I was doing something far more exhausting: finding a brand new reason every single time, a new angle, a different light to hold him in, so that going back didn’t feel like repetition. It felt like research. Like, if I just understood him a little better this time, I’d finally crack the code that explained why he kept choosing something else over me. Fitting, honestly, since I do a bit of work as a behavioral technician on the side. I just never expected that skill set to drift so far into my personal life. 

Here’s what nobody tells you about becoming an expert on someone: you can know everything about why a person is the way they are and it still won’t answer the one question that actually matters, which is whether they’re choosing you. This isn’t a “pick me, choose me, love me” moment. I’m not asking to be picked, I’m just finally clocking that I wasn’t. I could build a PhD thesis on his patterns. I could tell you exactly what mood precedes a disappearance, exactly which excuses come attached to which silence. I have a whole internal taxonomy at this point and zero of it was ever useful information. I was so good at understanding him that I never noticed I’d stopped asking myself a much simpler question: did I still want this, or had I just gotten really skilled at explaining why I did?

I think for a long time, the answer was genuinely yes, I wanted it, badly, embarrassingly, the kind of wanting that makes you a little annoying to your friends. But sometime in the last few months that started to shift, and I didn’t notice because I was too busy doing what I always do, building him a new alibi like I was on retainer. The version of him I kept chasing back to wasn’t even the man he is now. It was some earlier edition, one that existed before whatever happened to make him someone who could keep choosing something else over me, over and over, without it costing him anything. I wasn’t chasing a fantasy. He’s real. He still exists. He just apparently exists somewhere in which I’m not a permanent fixture, and I spent way too long treating that like a puzzle instead of an answer, when really it was multiple choice and I kept picking “none of the above.”

What’s different now isn’t that he did something worse than before. It’s that I’m finally tired in a way that doesn’t come with a follow-up excuse attached. There’s no new angle. No different light. I’ve genuinely run out, which is a strange, almost anticlimactic way for something to end. Not a blowup, not a betrayal I can point to dramatically in a group chat, just a slow realization that I’ve been the only one showing up with a fully stocked explanation kit, while he showed up with nothing, over and over, and somehow we both called that even. 

I’m scared this is really it. I’ll say that plainly, because pretending otherwise would defeat the entire point of writing this. But I’m also noticing, for maybe the first time, that the fear doesn’t feel like the fear of losing him. It feels more like the fear of losing the habit of him, the routine of finding reasons, the identity of being someone who understands him better than anyone else does, yet still somehow missed the only thing worth understanding. Those aren’t the same thing and I think I’ve been confusing them for a long time, possibly longer than I’m willing to fully admit out loud. He has long stopped wanting me the way I wanted him. I think some part of me has known for longer than this last go-around. I just kept finding new light to avoid looking at it directly. 

Maybe this is finally the version that sticks, not because anything dramatic happened, but because I’m out of new reasons and for once, I’m not in a rush to go looking for one.

Danielle Cox

Pace '27

Danielle is a junior at Pace University, where she is majoring in International Relations and Global Studies with minors in Diplomacy and Middle Eastern studies. Her academic focus reflects her deep interests in global affairs, and she hopes to one day build a career in law or policy, with a particular passion for international work and human rights advocacy.
Outside classes, Danielle is committed to giving back to her community. She volunteers with Planned Parenthood of Greater New York and the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. This work fuels her drive to advocate for marginalized communities and shapes the perspectives she bring to her studies and her writing. As a proud Brooklyn native, she carries her city's energy and diversity with her everywhere she goes, and it continues to inform how she sees the world.
When she's not studying or volunteering, you can find Danielle curled up with a good book, journaling, or writing poetry. She uses her love of words to guide the way she processes the world. She also loves doing makeup and occasionally braiding hair for friends and family, finding joy in these small acts of self-expression. She joined Her Campus because she wanted a space to explore her voice beyond academic writing and connect with other women who share passion in similar issues.