I could hear her scream “two weeks…..” as she fell off the cliff. This was an inside joke my ex, B, and I had. Two weeks in to our relationship, we went on a hike with my friend Jen. Jen took a picture of us – it became one of our favorites. As we posed, I warned B not to step too far back, and she joked about the tragic and untimely demise of our relationship.
When she left me back in April, I read through our texts (twice). It was a lot of texts. I had been hoping to pinpoint where it all went wrong. Every once in a while I find myself thinking about something she said, and I’ll go back to see what it was, try to get the context. Tonight, I was thinking about how we each thought that the other person had changed our lives for the better, forever. While searching, I came across the two weeks joke. It made me laugh – we were pretty funny sometimes.
When I revisit our old texts, I tend to skip over the arguments. It’s amazing how much space they took up – even if they didn’t take up the bulk of our physical time…. Negative energy always requires so much more time and space than positive energy does. “I love you. Miss You, Kiss You” takes up a single line of text. Trying to explain complex feelings while taking in to consideration your partner’s feelings takes up lots of lines of text. If this were a blog that just said I loved B, it’d probably be pretty short. Instead, it’s an exploration of the challenges of love – at least as I experienced them. When I look at those arguments, the fights were all so stupid. They were almost always the result of a misinterpretation (no matter how hard we tried) of what was being said and felt. We started therapy to learn how to communicate better. Each of us could have let go of the fight in the moment, could have recognized it for what it was, and stopped it with an “I love you.” I remember one time thinking it would be funny to put a towel on her shoulders like a cape mid fight and say, now you’re super mad. Relationships absolutely require humor. Most of the time, we weren’t that far apart on what we were saying….
Instead of the bad moments, I prefer to think of really awesome ones, like walks with her dog, Zelle, our flight out to visit her family (when I wasn’t sure how or when I would propose), or the time I surprised her by taking her to a sunflower farm – it was beautiful grey fall day with sunflowers in every direction. We watched a young couple get engaged – “a joyous shot at how things ought to be.”
For me, we had too many good moments to really remember the bad ones.
I had to stop this post to attend a work event last night (and another one this morning). While I was out last night, B sent an email…
She found my blog. She’s upset. She made it a point to tell me that her boyfriend is upset (I suspect that was meant to hurt or at the very least to show how far she’s moved on). Perhaps a not so subtle reminder that I was easy to forget, easy to replace. And so I remind myself there were lots of moments when she wasn’t this hurtful. When she believed we were the best couple ever.
[Tuesday, January 8, 2019 6:40:40 AM] B: I love you more than anyone I’ve ever loved. I’ve learned a lot because of you.
Because it’s playing on the stereo…. I’m going to end with “Love and Hate” Two sides of the coin of deep emotional attachment.