Good morning texts, road trips, long nights under the stars; I miss the way our fingers interlocked, your voice at 3 a.m., the way I could never look at you and not smile. But do I miss you?
When you’re in a long-term relationship, you fall into a comfortable routine. You wake up to that person, spend the day somehow connected to them and end the day with them. They’re always there to fall back on, to text, to vent to, to support you. They become an integral part of your daily functioning. But then, of course, it all goes south—the dreaded break-up.
Whether it ends in flames and retweeted Taylor Swift lyrics, or it’s a mere mutual understanding of different paths, that person won’t fill the huge role in your life that they once did. The routine ends.
Ending a long-term relationship is so much more than losing a person.
People may over-exaggerate the cliché “life turned upside down,” but in this case, you might as well be the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Your entire environment and routine shifts, causing this mass earthquake of heartbreak and confusion. So much changes when one element disappears. They aren’t there to fall back on, to text, to vent to, to support you. Now, you have to face someone you haven’t for a while—yourself.
Who are you without them? In a relationship, you are a version of yourself reflected from your partner—they love your flaws, kiss your scars, heal your pain. They make you a better version of you. And when you’re with someone for so long, you grow accustomed to who you are with that person and the routine you create with them. But when that metaphoric mirror disappears, you’re left staring into your own eyes.
So where to now? The answer is the beginning. New shoes, a new path, new tracks to leave. But the first step is saying thank you to your ex. Thank you for teaching me, for growing with me, for living life with me. Thanks for causing me to crash to ground zero and for forcing me to look at myself, study myself and find a new way.
Though painful, the first steps are the most crucial. Self-discovery is erfahrung: the type of experience in terms of continuity used by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer in his analysis of play. Falling in love is always worth it. It’s part of our erfahrung. We fall in and out of love, grow and keep living. We’re all just navigating our own paths that may cross and intertwine and eventually unwind to be alone again. But on those longest, loneliest and most lackluster stretches, we truly find ourselves.