Knowing When to Let Go
By Meredith Ullery
As someone who has loved and lost, I can say from the bottom of my heart, it is better than never having loved at all. I fell in love when I was 15, and nothing can compare to the euphoria I felt as we grew in love during the summer under the trees of our local park. Being as young as we were, it seemed as though we were stuck in time, in a perfect world away from pain and heartbreak. It was us against the world, as as far as we were concerned, our love was forever. We dated for two years and by the time I turned 17, nothing else mattered except he and I. We had grown together in such a way that our relationship seemed impermeable; we were convinced nothing could break us apart.
It was during my senior year of high school when I started to question the depth of our relationship. My dad was initially the one who brought up the fact that I was the only one out of the two of us who had a job and a car, and that this guy was making no effort to find employment to help support the relationship. This was the first red flag that warned me that the relationship I had with him was not entirely healthy.
Soon after the start of my senior year, I was accepted into the college of my choice and he was the first person I called. His disinterest was extremely apparent as he picked up the phone and merely told me that it was “nice” that I got into college and that he was busy. I heard no excitement in his tone, and it hurt to know that he really didn’t care. As time went on, he began paying me less attention and treating me with less respect than he used to. Even when I brought this to his attention, he would brush it off. I began noticing that I would leave his house feeling lonely and used by him almost every day.
After December, he moved schools due to zoning issues and I was left, knowing almost nobody because of how much time I had dedicated to him. I encouraged him to make friends at his new school, all the while neglecting myself and my own needs. I was lonely and stressed, and my mental health began to decline when I realized how alone I felt in general, and how I was putting much more into my relationship than I was getting out of it. I knew I needed to leave him, but I was afraid of being alone and told myself that I could fix everything on my own.
When he began to focus his attention on another girl, I took it as a sign that I was not giving him enough of my own time and even agreed to do things I was uncomfortable with in an effort to keep him. He would constantly drop her name in our conversations, talking about the things she said and the things she would give him out of the blue. I could feel him slipping away from me, but the part that hurt the most was knowing that there was nothing I could do.
I would wake up every morning and give him everything I had, only to cry myself to sleep at night over the lies he would tell me and secrets he would keep. After weeks of this happening and multiple attempts to keep our relationship, I realized there was nothing left to save. I felt stupid and ashamed that I had fought for so long, when the only thing I was fighting for anymore was a sense of security. It was him who ended things, and the thing that was the hurt most was my pride.
Any relationship worth keeping maintains a mutual respect and 100% effort and dedication from each person. I felt as though I would never find someone else, so I stayed with someone who gave me much less than I deserved until it left me with nothing. I found out a few months after we broke up, that the girl he had left me for did the same things that he did to me. Unfortunately, I fell down the same path once more and allowed him to worm his way into my life. We spent nights on the phone discussing what it would be like if we were to rekindle what we had, and he made me believe that it could happen again. Only after he ghosted me while I was in a time of dire need did I realize how little he actually cared for me.
I was hurt and angry at myself for letting him get inside my thoughts again. It took longer than I hoped it would, but I realize now that towards the end, I was more in love with the memories we shared together than I was with him. When I look back at the nights I spent crying over the things he said and did, and the lies he told me, my favorite memories of us together mean less and less. My heart aches for those times, but my head knows that the person I knew then has changed and nothing can be done to erase the things he has put me through. Nobody should feel that he/she has to put up with anything less than they deserve just for the security of being in a relationship. When you feel that the memories you share with a person are more treasured than the actual current relationship, sometimes letting go of what you have can spare you months of time wasted on heartache from trying to save what is already lost.