For the last forty-five days I've been a mess. For much of my life I've been lauded by many friends for being steady...But for the last month and a half I've been the most unsteady I've felt in my adult life.
A normally joyful, hopeful, resilient person, I got the wind knocked out of me. Big time. I spent 287 days investing in a, by then, very serious dating relationship. Of those, 158 were before I broke it off for a month, and 129 were before he broke it off...for good. It was one of the toughest, richest experiences I've had. Long distance is sort of a relational incubator - if you care at all about your relationship. And we did; we texted constantly, talked on the phone for over an hour daily, Snapchat will never be the same - in fact I might have to delete the app because I don't really care about it now. We put in the work of a good relationship, and that's what we got.
So when it happened, a heavy silence and a wave of tears ensued, like an immediate hurricane of feelings. These are the kind that seem to drown you because you can't get out words and the new reality you're ingesting punches you in the gut. Oddly though, I myself had been questioning the very reasons he cited. In fact, just the other day I revisited my journal from the first stint of our togetherness, and found them echoing in a foreshadow that I'd somehow forgotten. The old adage: love is blind...
In the last few weeks as I processed my new reality, I waded through the remaining flood of emotions. I couldn't wait to not feel the way I did, but I wasn't ready to let go of hope. I had spent many of those days and weeks and months with him thinking I was on the road to marriage. This man and I crossed each others' paths and found out we really liked each other, -- even more, we really loved each other. Now, we were ending that thing that I thought was "it".
Something I've been told over and over is that what I'm experiencing is "normal". I have hated that each time I've heard it. Why should anything about parting from your love be normal? I never expected to date and love someone - let alone for them to love me - but that it wouldn't work out. While some may call that naive, (and fine, I don't care what those people think,) I don't think it is naive to hope that love is important. There's a weird paradox I can't fully articulate: I don't regret the relationship, but if I'd known at the beginning that it wouldn't work out I probably wouldn't have bothered. Ah, hypotheticals... Truly, I don't regret it, although it is so incredibly painful to set your mind, heart, and life to the tune of something that suddenly stops. So, yeah, if I'd known...
The thing is, I did know. But I had that optimism, that fight. All the more confusing that that's the stuff it takes to make a lifelong relationship last: hope and persevering in love.
Then there's the natural progression of relationship which makes things all the more complicated, well in Christian dating anyways. If the relationship works alright, it will continue on its trajectory toward marriage and without an honest, critical eye it may go that way when really it shouldn't. In my case, the same breaking points that were there all along somehow didn't deter me from mentally and emotionally following the foreseen trail to a wedding - and I'm so not that girl. I pay attention to things, and to myself. Yet, when I read through the journal entries from our beginning and well into serious conversations, the threads that would unravel it all were dangling there throughout. It's just that I am the girl that sacrifices for the most important relationships in her life.
In fact, now I'm a little scared of it all. How do people do this over and over? I'm left with all these lessons of experience, and the feeling that I don't ever want to use them. I won't try to say I'll never bother to be in love again, but the reality is that this wasn't something small and simple. It was an all-in, go for the gold type thing. So no, walking away and falling apart doesn't feel normal, nor should it. But maybe I can just settle in, with my piles of unwound, tangled thread, and that will be okay. I'll be okay. Just me.
