Each time I go through a bad break up, I immediately look back on my memories of the relationship and try to see all the things I did and said, to try and find lessons in them. I do this as it gives me a cold comfort and because I hope to never repeat them again in the future. I’d probably credit me doing this more than any of the tricks of trade I learned regarding women, for my success with them. For each new relationship I had, I instantly put to use the new lessons and saw almost immediate results each time. In fact, each successive serious relationship I had was more satisfying than the last, and each girl was better quality than the last.

However, apparently I haven’t done this to all of them. This break up here, wasn’t really a break up.

“You see, this past weekend, I broke up with my girlfriend. It was the most amicable break up I’ve had the pleasure of enduring to this day. The thing was, I knew it was coming. I knew it the night before. I knew it a month before.

Because I had warnings – repeated warnings.

Many men who say they didn’t see it coming either couldn’t read the signs or didn’t want to.

You know how it goes. The relationship cools down slightly. Comfortable. You’ve got a confidence that’s hard to rock.

Then it happens. Somethings’s amiss.

She doesn’t refer to you by your usual pet name. She doesn’t sign off in the usual manner. She replies to the messages you send slower than usual. She forgets to call you back. She is not as receptive to your advances as you last remember. She asks you what would you would do if she just didn’t want to have sex anymore. You can’t remember the last time she got jealous. She told you that if you broke up, she was happy she met you.

I’m sure you’ll recognize something in there.”

That break up didn’t affect me as bad as it would have because it was never over for me. Because I never had to deal with it. At the time, I was worried about my mother who had a stroke three months prior and losing my job, which was extremely important to me. By the time I had overcome my physical limitations and saved my job I had met someone on tinder, a German girl I called Jora, who surprised me with the caliber of person she was and how quick I was smitten by her.

A single attack of conscience, doing the right thing at an awkward time set the relationship on a collision course from which it didn’t recover. It ended with the girl I thought I might love going completely radio silent on me, including deleting my snapchat, me as a friend on Facebook, and blocking me on all channels of communication. I was…destroyed. Morose. Miserable. Desperate to learn new lessons so that this would never happen again. And I did learn.

But I didn’t learn from my break up with…we’ll call her Mia. I never truly suffered through the break up, truly examined why it ended beyond an increased amount of distance. The thing is, I always believed that distance takes problems and exacerbates them. It is not necessarily the problem in of itself.

However, recently this past December, close to New Year’s I started talking to Mia again. She broke up with her then boyfriend about a week later, something I was not surprised about. Using the lessons I learned from Jora, I immediately set about telling her a lot of my innermost thoughts about what happened and ultimately trying to make her understand that she was in fact important to me and that I did in fact care about her, more than she thought. Because I never fully suffered from the break up, and I realize, never fully accepted it was over, old feelings started to come back. I starting thinking about getting back together with her. After a while, she got wise to me and asked me why I was talking to her so much all of a sudden.

I talked to her pretty much everyday for a large part of January. Some of February. But then I fell back into old habits. From my last conversation with her, she briefly thought about getting back together when I bought and mailed her flowers for Valentine’s day. The first time I’ve ever done anything like that for her, and apparently the first time any boyfriend of hers ever bought her flowers. But then shortly after I disappeared into my old habits and video games, when my life had taken a turn for the worse. She realized that I hadn’t quite changed and that she was that important to me. At least I definitely didn’t act like it.

Last night, I had a long conversation with her, and probably the last one for a while. I started off by asking how she was and how her new banking job was doing. When she asked about me, I didn’t hide that I was hurt, but didn’t focus on it either. While I did want to get back together, still felt like I loved her, her answering my first question of “What are you thinking/What do you want?” quickly dispelled any notion of trying to go that way. So I prolonged the conversation so I could one enjoy her company as much as I could before it was over and two so I could be comfortable enough to tell her what I was really thinking.

She repaid me in full by explaining how she felt good when she broke up with her exe because she didn’t have to worry about someone else. Why they weren’t texting her, what were they doing, why didn’t they want to spend every minute with her. And she didn’t want to meet someone new and lose that good feeling. But she did. She met someone as she was leaving her old job. Told me how she didn’t want to like him, but he was steadfast in texting her every day, all the time. At first she didn’t like it, but it grew on her. She noticed that he was texting her when he woke up, when he was at work, and when he couldn’t see her, he wanted to call her. She felt happy and didn’t know why and that’s when one of her friends told her that she felt loved and cared for (she briefly tried to say that she didn’t need it, but it was very nice to have! 😉 ). There were many other things said and discussed but the important thing is twofold:

1. Dealing with this situation has been extremely painful for me. I haven’t felt this bad since highschool or my second serious relationship in college.
2. I’ve realized that I was a terrible boyfriend to this girl in many ways. And I never saw that before. The fact that I was her first and had other redeeming qualities merely meant that I got away with more than I should have. And it’s these many lessons I’m learning, now that I see things with a new lens once again, that give me enough cold comfort to function normally right now, instead of curling into a ball and mulling over what a I gem I had, what a gem I overlooked.

~Wald

Song: Right Through You – Drain