I’m not a very religious person. Although I’ve spent half of my life growing up in a strict, sectarian primary and secondary school up until college where we have to study the Bible every Friday with the rest of our curriculum being gospel-integrated all throughout. That said, I came across this very familiar bible text one day and considering what I’ve been through in the past couple of months, it hit differently.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7 “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.“
I think one doesn’t have to believe in the bible to know that what’s being said here really do apply in real life. At some point I did understand that in my past relationship I have had my fair share of shortcomings but this bible text pretty much gave me a clearer picture of what I also did wrong as a partner.
It’s one thing to hold the other person accountable for their actions but what I find is more important is that we pay closer attention to how react to it.
1. We were patient. But not patient enough.
2. We were kind. But we became unkind when we arguments become heated.
3. I was envious as a boyfriend for being left out at times when she sought sexual and emotional fulfillment from other people.
4. At some point I was too proud and boasted that I loved her but I didn’t need her and that if she wanted to leave me, I’d let her go and unintentionally, that made her feel taken for granted, I believe.
5. I have dishonored her when I would vent out to her friends about my issues with her.
6. However, I didn’t have a habit of keeping records of her wrongs. I don’t keep in score and wait for the right moment to hash out the past so I can veer the conversation away from a current issue.
7. I didn’t delight in evil either. I didn’t sleep with anyone to spite her or openly confessed my strong need to have her punished for her mistakes believing that it was what she deserved.
8. I failed to protect her when I spilled the truth about us to one of the guys she had an affair with.
9. I couldn’t trust her because I knew what she was capable of doing behind my back. But I’ve learned that you trust someone not because you know they won’t let you down, you trust someone because you actively choose to even if you know they might let you down. You give a person a chance to be loved by trusting them. But we can only do so much.
10. I’ve hoped. I’ve been hopeful for an amazing future together but given the circumstances, a reality-check was called in place in the end.
11. I didn’t persevere like an emotionally mature person would. We didn’t persevere enough. At one point after the breakup, I have imagined what I would have said or done differently had I known better- it would have been to go and say “No. This is not going to be the end. I am not leaving you this easily. You sit tight and listen to me! I’m going to love you anyway and there’s still so much to learn between us. We will get through this. This is what commitment looks like and its uncomfortable but we will grow out of this stage in our relationship and be happy and fulfilled in the end.” I know this is not a cookie-cutter approach to any relationship but the grit here and the perseverance gives the relationship a chance to evolve and that’s what counts. You give the relationship a chance to develop a healthier and stronger dynamic as you persevere because you have the patience and kindness to keep going. You have the humility and respect. You give your trust. You believe in the better people you can become even when it’s hard to see it now because you have hope.
In my opinion, the whole text just meshes together so well and goes in full circle. In real life, it’s hard to say you don’t need these attributes of love for your relationship to survive.
I believe it’s also important to remember that this text doesn’t only apply in a singular direction that starts with you and towards another person. It is also necessary to for love to begin with you and also towards yourself. Otherwise, it would be harder for you to see when the time is right to move on and let go of a toxic relationship that you’re not ready for. If you don’t love yourself too, you risk emptying yourself for selfish people who have no regard for your wellbeing.
Anyway, I wish I could have shared this message more eloquently. But this is about as good as it gets with enough coffee in my system. Sorry, haha! I hope this still shares a bit of insight and sparks even a little hope and inspiration for my readers.
I prefer where I am right now. I don’t have the energy to be romantic right now. I don’t have the energy to hug someone or kiss someone and need it to mean a lot. I don’t have the energy to trust someone with my vulnerabilities thinking I’m going to marry that person one day. I don’t have the time to worry about lying in bed all day thinking it’s going to upset someone. I don’t need the complexities of being included in someone else’s idea of a happy life. I don’t need to feel like I’d be lost without someone or have to deal with another person who wants to add to my happiness. I don’t need someone who wants to know me better. I don’t need that kind of company right now.
What I need at this point in my life is to sit with myself everyday and ask myself what being here today means to me and do all that it takes to learn to bear the weight of this life with my own two feet.
On my own.
I want to take the essence of being here as a singular creature and acknowledge the significance of my existence regardless of external opinion. I want to see every single day how important it is that I am still alive and why I make my mistakes or what I’m excellent at.
I want to know me. I want to love me. A good relationship with myself is what I need right now.
Until then, the demands of romance is not an urgent matter. I don’t want to have to commit and then lie or pretend to still love a person or rely on them to meet my needs when I should be giving it to myself. I’m not that clueless and desperate. I’m broken… But I’m not an invalid. A lot of things here may seem difficult but most of it are not impossible to fix and we’re all more capable than we think if only we tried where it truly counts.
I went to our apartment to get the last of my stuff. I haven’t had enough sleep from the flight coming here and the whole endeavor of packing up my stuff in boxes and bubble-wrapping everything was more exhausting than I thought. My back hurt and I sweated like a pig all the while thinking I was doing just the exact opposite of this a few years ago when I was bringing my things into our apartment. Now I’m doing it in reverse. I felt like I was symbolically cleaning out my space in your life now that I have no place in it- just actively using my own hands to touch the reality of the matter and rearranging things and putting them where they currently belong which is “somewhere far and out of your life.”
Not much has changed except for the 2 colonies of darkling beetles in our bedroom. It looks like your mom has been using our bedroom since you haven’t been home for most of the time. It seems you haven’t been staying there as much since we broke up. Her perfume bottles were laid out in rows on the shelf mixed with your stuff. It’s funny that she’s still completely unaware of your pet snake in that unsuspicious plastic box you’ve been keeping it in. I say it’s funny because she wouldn’t be sleeping in that room if she only knew. You know she hates snakes. She’ll have your head if she finds out.
By the way, I left the necklace you gave me in its old box where you also kept the necklace from your ex-fiancé.
Your mom came over last night we had a great time catching up over beer and good music. She told me about her life and as always I enjoyed listening to her stories. There are still so many things in life that we agree on and we still make each other laugh a lot. Your mom is an amazing person. She reminds me of the good side of you.
My buzz was kicking in and I asked her what she thought of your new boyfriend and she had no issues about it other than they barely talked. She said she has been holding back because she’s scared of developing an attachment to your new boyfriend and didn’t want to have to experience another loss if you break up. She told me that her life is full of people who just come and go so I assured her that I’ll be her constant. I love your mom so much. She’s like my second mom when I’m in this city.
After a few beers and rounds of loud obnoxious laughter, I went to use the bathroom. I looked down and my stream was hitting the side of the toilet. “God, I’m drunk. But that’s okay. This is good. It’s been a while since I’ve had good company. Wow, I used to shower in this bathroom. I used to live here but now I just feel so detached. It’s surreal. This just feels like a dream to me now. Am I dreaming? Oh, what’s that? A tiny vase of strange flowers on the sink. That wasn’t there before. “
Then I went back outside to finish the rest of my beer.
Your mom and I talked about how things just seem to happen with such timing. She spoke of how we tend to lose things to other people and then gain some of it back when we go on and meet new people and I agreed with her. People come and go and somehow we have our needs met one way or another, in different and unexpected instances, and it doesn’t have to be in the exact order that we have set in our minds… We don’t even know if we actually needed something until it’s there and done. I responded “ever wonder how you got to this stage in your life and realized you’ve made all the right decisions after all when in fact all you knew back then was you were so scared and unsure and just really trying to survive? Look at you now. You’re safe, you’re healthy, you’re getting by everyday, and you have two loving children.” She nodded to me with a smile that implied I tried to put it simply when we both knew how deep and complex that actually meant for us.
Experiencing a life with you has taught me some extremely important lessons that I didn’t know I still needed to learn. I had to lose my confidence and self-worth to realize how I can protect it. When I left, I came home to my own family feeling lost and insecure and it was at home where I started to get my bearings back. Love awaits me in many places. I am surrounded by love and it scares me to think that I could have completely destroyed myself for not realizing on time how much I am loved by the ones that know me. Wanting you or hating you only breaks my spirit. So I’m letting go of you more and more now. Loving you from a distance is fine- loving you in a way I love strangers for being human beings with their own stories to tell. It wouldn’t matter much to me if you’re happier now, all I know is we all deserve that. You deserve to be happy just as much as I do.
I want to thank you for challenging my known weaknesses and bringing out the ones I didn’t know I had. I want to thank you for the friends I’ve met because of being with you. If I hadn’t met you I wouldn’t have the amazing friends I have now. Your mom and sister, they love me. Your friends love me. That’s all I needed to know. I am loveable and I matter.
When you’re lonely or by yourself and you come home to an empty apartment just know that life is bigger than a finished chapter.
Wherever you are right now and whatever your plans for the future are I hope it all pans out and if it doesn’t, well, keep walking. That’s all most of us ever do anyway… because life simply goes on.
My ex-partner always complained about how lazy I was and that I wasn’t putting enough on the table. I was overall an insensitive person who lacked the ability to pick up social cues and exhibit basic human decency.
That was the main problem.
I didn’t really do much to change that except when I actually remembered what was expected of me. It’s easy to say I just didn’t care. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, I honestly am just very forgetful (this is an understatement. I am planning to seek help about my forgetfulness, it doesn’t seem normal for a healthy human to be as forgetful as I am) and I have a nature of not demanding things so I thought it was okay to relax about it. I was wrong.
When I do accomplish what was asked of me, my act of redeeming myself would be called out as undoing. I ended up feeling invalidated which then caused me to become unmotivated to even try anymore.
As a result, I began to feel small, and incapable. The resentment started to creep in and the fights became more frequent.
There have been many nights when we would have a few beers together and have such a meaningful conversation.
Only when she’s had enough to drink would she take the conversation to hashing out my past mistakes and calling me out on her issues with my behavior. She would passionately criticize me and make me feel small. This became a pattern throughout our entire relationship and I had learned the skill to disengage and de-escalate it by implying that I didn’t wish to fight with her.
Most times, we would end up lashing out at each other and ruin what was supposedly a wonderful evening.
I’ve always wondered why she believed so much in my past mistakes and didn’t believe I could be better. When I needed compassionate encouragement to break my pattern of repetitive failure, she gave me destructive criticism as if the best way to end her suffering was to end the relationship there and then. I just wanted her to believe in me. But she chose to degrade me and I often retaliated with the same sentiments even when I knew I didn’t really mean it.
We have been in an open relationship since day one. I’ve made that compromise not solely for my own benefit but because my ex-partner warned me that she was incapable of staying loyal in an exclusive relationship and that I can’t blame her if she would eventually start cheating.
So I thought, “if an open relationship meant I could keep her, then so be it.”
Don’t get me wrong. I did enjoy having sexual activities with multiple people (sometimes simultaneously, even). But I never made any emotional attachments to them because I knew it would be unfair.
But farther into the relationship, she started to develop emotional attachments with the other guys. It got to a point where I was coerced to stay and participate in a throuple. I would get the exclusivity, but yes, there were three of us. Exclusively.
That was the only time I ever get exclusivity and I had to share it with a third person.
I allowed it…
But during the whole endeavor of trying to develop this new set-up, I had experienced being left out more times than I had imagined I could tolerate.
This added to my resentment towards her and I went through weeks obsessively thinking about breaking up.
I couldn’t handle the invalidation. I couldn’t handle being made to feel like I was only second best; I was just an option. An insurance policy for if in any case the throuple thing didn’t work out she still won’t end up alone because I chose to stay. There were even times prior to this when I had expressed my feelings of hurt towards the whole open-relationship situation where she would leave in the wee hours and I would wake up alone in the morning only to find out she went out to sleep with another guy and she would respond by telling me that I only felt bad about it because of the way I think as an individual. I didn’t have the right to feel jealous despite being the official boyfriend and that was my problem. She would even fight me over other guys as if I had no right to meddle with her affairs. I wasn’t entitled to the relationship as much as she was. She never saw me as her equal. She looked down on me like I was inferior to her. She had never even asked me what I wanted to do. Ever. I have been in a third-party relationship once with my ex before she finally decided to be with me. Even then, I was still just an option.
My ex-partner measured love by the way I returned favors like doing chores and doing what was asked of me.
When I failed to do these things my partner automatically felt unloved and taken for granted.
My partner felt like I had to do certain things to be assured of being loved back; that it was only mutual if I hit the criteria.
The more I failed to meet my ex-partner’s expectations the more her doubts about our relationship grew and it built a wall between us that was becoming more and more difficult to penetrate and it consumed us.
I think my ex-partner had this belief that we needed to so work hard to earn love.
What my ex-partner didn’t realize is I never asked much from her to earn mine. I was willing to share with her what I knew about life but she wasn’t the kind to be taught. She wanted to teach me to fit into her ideal version of who I ought to be. It hurt me to have to cut my corners and I was mostly resistant to it. She couldn’t control me. I let her do what she wanted and have anyone she wanted even when I had nothing. She gave me exclusion when I wanted exclusivity. She even slept with another guy just to spite me and it hurt a lot. In the end, I felt like she never saw us as equals. I could be wrong but that’s how I have felt.
On top of that, I don’t think we loved ourselves enough for our relationship to work. We both had unhealed wounds from our own individual history of trauma and our issues with ourselves influenced how we approached our issues with each other.
What was bad about her was not good for what was bad about me. It just didn’t land.
Even then I still chose to stay.
These patterns of fighting and jealousy in our relationship continued.
Until one night…
We were hanging out with some friends at our apartment. I got drunk and she had left her phone on the table. A couple of messages popped up on her lockscreen and I read the messages from another guy who was expressing his feelings for being rejected by my partner since she was already into this other guy we were supposed to be in a throuple with.
I took the phone and told the guy texting, everything. My ex found out and got mad at me. Told me I wasn’t worth it. At that moment I knew we had to end it. She asked me why I wanted to destroy her. I never wanted to destroy her. I just wanted more truth in our relationship. That other guy texting her deserved to know the truth and to understand exactly what he got himself into.
That night was the end of everything between us.
Looking back, I thought maybe my laziness and forgetfulness made her feel unloved. I realized that, to her, if I followed her commands, it would confirm that I loved her and the less I did what was asked of me the more she felt unloved and that led her to feel taken for granted. Me doing what she wanted me to do was how she measured my love for her.
I know from her background that she was raised in an environment where she had to work so hard to earn love. She was testing me the whole time. She tested me everyday and I had failed to make her feel loved. But most importantly I had failed to remind her that she didn’t have to earn my love because I gave it freely and she never had to go through the pains of testing it. She was going about things the best way she knew how and it didn’t work for me. I also thought I was doing my part as a partner by granting her an open relationship. I did what I also thought was best for us by moving in with her so I could be with her everyday because I knew she couldn’t stand being alone. I had sacrificed my years to live with her and her family too, and got along well with her friends. I practically shared her world.
Her parameters for love were in how often I followed her commands. Not in how much of my own life I have set aside just to be with her.
Not over 3 weeks after we had broken up, she told me that she and the guy we almost had a throuple with were now together. I was hurt to know it but it also didn’t surprise me. I accepted that’s just how she is. She constantly needs to have someone to survive. I hope to god she does survive.
I get that I didn’t address all her needs properly and It may have been a significant factor that led her to stop addressing mine later on in our relationship. I just wish she didn’t have to ask me to stay in the relationship while she did things in front of me with another guy just to show me how replaceable I was. I didn’t need that. But then again, I guess I did. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have learned my lesson.
My Accountability
She verbalized her needs and I have failed to address them. Ultimately, I neglected her needs. If I was willing to compromise to meet her need to sleep with other guys it shouldn’t have been hard for me to go another mile to assure her I loved her in a way she can understand. Her “commands” were just her needing to see I cared about her. I think it’s fair.
I’ve made the same mistakes over and over again even when I knew it was already threatening our relationship. I knew it was becoming bad for the both of us. I knew it was becoming the root of most of our frustrations about each other but despite apologizing, I went ahead and kept repeating my behavior anyway. I didn’t listen to my then-partner. I’ve addressed that I had a problem but I didn’t do much about it. I didn’t understand the weight of my actions. I didn’t listen to that little voice inside of me that told me to change my behavior or else things could go south. It didn’t scare me enough because I didn’t understand it enough. I just went on repeating my mistakes until it got worse and eventually resulted in the end of our relationship. I knew what was possibly going to happen, I knew the risks… I knew… I just didn’t know enough. It had to take me heartbreak and the cold, hard grief of losing someone I loved to gain the right insight and realize that I should have gone about things differently. Only the end result of my failed relationship can make me say “I should’ve done things differently.” It’s because of that prior experience and its end-result that I had learned “never again… ” but before all that, I wasn’t ready to change at all.
I hope she finds what she wants in life even if it meant forgetting me. We’re all broken in some ways, I don’t expect everyone to agree with each other in everything anyway. We’ll all be different one way or another. It’s all a matter of how much you’re willing to compromise to be in each other’s lives longer and it’s up to us to figure that out.
Only once we realize that we don’t want to live a certain way ever again or do certain things ever again will we ever know that we are ready to change.
I didn’t change then because I didn’t understand enough which meant I wasn’t ready to grow. Wishing I could have done things differently would mean wishing I were a different person. Because the mistakes I had done then; the way I had behaved then were all limited to the confines of who I was then- I knew the risks but I went ahead and risked it anyway because I didn’t know better all because I didn’t have the right experience to comprehend the extent of the consequences of my actions. I acted based on my limited understanding of the situation- at that moment with my past self. I did things and it was all I would’ve done in this universe at that certain point in time. Only a different version of me in a parallel universe would have “done things differently” in that exact same situation.
Wishing I had done differently would mean wishing I wasn’t me at all. All my strengths and all my weaknesses, my identity, my upbringing; all the insights that I had in that specific moment of my past had led me to behave in a certain way that has put me in my current disposition, led me to who I am now- a version of myself that now understands what way of living it was that I didn’t want to have anymore. It had to take me a painful breakup to figure that out.
My job now is to keep in mind that even though I had contributed to my relationship failing, I should not hate myself for it. I know now how pointless it is to keep repeating the words “I wish I had done things differently” in my head now that I understand that I couldn’t have done it any differently even if I could turn back the time.
If I were to reverse my personal growth back to that point in the past, It would still be the version of me who lacked the right experience to know better; it would still be that version of me who needed to go through such pain to fully appreciate the necessity to change. So, instead of saying “I could have done things differently,” it makes more absolute sense to keep saying “I have learned from my experience and what I can do differently in the future.”
I’m only me. In this universe there’s only one version of me. We are all bound to make mistakes because of our lack of knowledge and experience. Lessons will keep repeating in our lives until we are ready; until we understand that moving forward from that lesson will require us to hold ourselves accountable for our own mistakes and that only then will we ever get the chance to truly learn from it and realize how we can change to see a better outcome.
I get it now. I forgive myself. I’m not perfect but at least I know that I’m capable of learning. Maybe I didn’t show I was teachable back then. Maybe it took me this far to be taught a lesson. I know I’ve messed up. I wasn’t ready to change then but I learned my lesson and I’m ready to be better now. It’s going to be a life of learning, meaning, and evolving.
As for the things that I may still not be ready to change in myself, I am open to receiving my lessons. My body and spirit shall withstand what it requires to be wiser for the universe knows I prefer to finish my life’s journey knowing that I’ve tried.
——–
When I have a new relationship, I want to make sure to remind my partner that we are allowed to do other things to show our love. I can show my love in ways that don’t have to be in the way my partner had imagined. We can’t keep missing out on the little things that bear so much weight all because of how we idealize what love should look like to us and end up overlooking the pure and good intentions that our partner wishes to convey with their own actions.
In My next relationship, I’d like to instill in my partner that lovability is not measured by how much we do for each other. But it’s how much we address each other’s needs by expressing them and not by testing each other.
The mentality of “if you love me, you would do (INSERT CRITERIA)…” must be replaced with “I’m doing this for you because I feel good doing this for myself too. I hope you’ll like it, if not, then we must talk about it.” It’s the basic display of our own love languages and it only takes a discussion and willingness to understand for us to appreciate the way we communicate our love.
In the end, I don’t hate my ex. We’ve both hurt each other in a severity only we would understand. We were supposed to be friends after the break up. I initially thought I was capbale of it but I later decided to tell her that I can’t do it. It just hurt too much. Being strangers would be the best move for me. Now that I’m not committed to her anymore, I’ve finally decided to be committed to myself now.
I have been struggling with the storm in my mind. The tempest of emotions furiously blowing about, the intermittent heavy deluge of anger and grief comes and strikes my whole body with exceptional precision and stealth and then just suddenly stops to leave me weak and debilitated, freezes me in time. Paralyzed.
I know the things that I have accepted. I have taken accountability for my own faults. I have understood why I chose to end that relationship but for some reason I couldn’t stop going back-and-forth between anger, grief, and the gnawing feelings of abandonment and betrayal.
So I’m writing this now hoping that somehow it helps my brain process whatever residual feelings I may still have for that relationship. I really, really just want to be okay again. For what its worth, I don’t feel the urge to reach out to my ex anymore. I don’t even want to have any form connection with my ex at all. In fact, I’m at the point where I’m solely determined to face my own thoughts and feelings head-on so I can give them their right names and know where to place them. I know I need to do this because somehow I get that when you’re able to define something that takes place within you, you have a bigger chance to finally know exactly what to do with it. It only hurts more than it should when it’s misunderstood and I’m done hurting this way. I need to be more active about certain things in my life especially if it meant giving myself a chance to achieve something, in this case, I just want to feel whole again.
This could be it- my way towards having a deeper connection with myself and move towards healing. I was thinking that maybe I have not learned how to love myself to a degree which could’ve prevented this whole experience and that it was necessary to happen to me to realize that I need to do just that- to love myself enough. That’s what I think and it makes enough sense to me.
Why Are You Upset?
So now, I’m starting off with naming what needs to be named. The objective is to Identify how I really feel and replace that vague and general term “upset” with what it actually is.
I am upset because I feel rejected, unwanted, unloved, left out.
I am upset because, to an extent, I feel worthless.
I am upset because I feel betrayed. I feel lied to for being led to believe that I was loved in my own perception of what love was and I feel humiliated and foolish for clinging to such an idea.
I am upset because my insecurity has been touched and played with. I am upset because I was easily replaced by someone else in the end which I then took as reflection of my own worth.
I am upset because I have been demeaned by someone I trusted to love me whole-heartedly.
I am upset because I feel invalidated, unimportant, inferior.
That’s all, so far. That kind of felt like I just took the biggest shit I have ever shitted out in my entire life. I’m a little exhausted and relieved at the same time. That felt good. Kind of like admitting something you’ve been lying about your entire life. Wow.
I’m a little surprised that I didn’t cry while writing this. I just don’t pity myself like that anymore. I just want to heal. I want to finish what I have to feel and move forward in my life. I have a strong belief that better things are ahead of me and they’re waiting to meet me there. So, no matter how paralyzing it gets right now, no matter how daunting this big change may be, I want to believe in the hope that I have left in me. I want deal with things differently this time. I am done chasing people in the name of love. I don’t have to beg for love if I have enough on my own. I deserve love; the amount and quality that I know I can give myself. So no more begging, no more asking, no more chasing.
I am creating a special graveyard for all of these feelings and, in time, I will bury them one by one with their cute little tombstones. I know It’s going to be a process but like I’ve said before, I am determined to come out of this in one piece. This is my road to wholeness.
Now that I think of it, “Goodbye” is such a holy word in times like these but you have to work hard to be able to use its power. All the best of luck to all of you who need to work hard enough to be able to say “goodbye” and really mean it. We all deserve to be whole and free.