A Closed Chapter…

I have learned some very difficult but necessary truths from this journey with Nate. Sometimes you try your best and it’s still not enough. That’s not a reflection on you and somewhere out there, my person awaits. I now realise I dived head first into a losing battle from the very beginning. Trying to build a future with a man that had idealism at the forefront of his search for his forever partner meant that I could never live up to his expectations. I destroyed parts of myself trying to understand his paradox of wanting to find the one, but expecting the demise of everything good in his life.

I’ve learned that feelings are not static, and that people use their trauma to excuse poor behaviour and mixed messages. That really impacted my sense of self-worth, because how could someone say to you one day that you’re the most special person they’ve ever met and that your voice is their favourite sound in the world, and then have zero regard for your feelings the next? That they’d never connected with anyone like this before and they’d told their friends that you could genuinely be the one?

It was the loneliest I have ever felt while being involved with someone and I often wondered to myself what the point of staying was. Being with Nate felt like having someone without ever really having them at all. I couldn’t confide in him about anything, his efforts would be inconsistent, and making plans felt like pulling teeth. I lost the space of calm that I’ve always prided myself on, and I started to long for his attention which he would give in fleeting but grand moments.

He knew all the right things to say, but when it really mattered, he couldn’t live up to his promises. Caught between trying to appease the person whose behaviour was so hard to read, I began to lose myself in the cognitive dissonance of what I now realise was his disorganised attachment at play. The constant highs and lows left me in a permanently confused and anxious state of mind and I didn’t know who I was anymore. He was a master manipulator, operating under the facade of being a hopeless romantic with a troubled past.

Nate was always chasing the big feeling, and hoping that he’d know when he felt it. But I am better than that. I know that true connection takes time, a lot of work, communication and commitment to cultivate into something real. I’m not searching for one in a million, I’m looking for enough. Because to me, that is a high but realistic bar. If your idea of love is based off your feelings in the moment, then you can’t possibly know what it is. Because feelings are fickle, and they will fail you once the initial euphoria of getting to know a person fades. You have to choose to be present with the person each day otherwise every relationship you pursue will be a dead end.

Looking back, perhaps we were both sold on a fantasy of each other given how this all started. A whirlwind romance while I was abroad, with both of us taking express but virtual courses in each other’s lives and pasts. Of course we would have filled the gaps with our imaginations. I never felt fully comfortable in his presence, and even less so in the inbetween moments, always uncertain of whether he still had feelings for me. Even with more exposure, it never felt more natural and I realise now that I was longing for the dream of this man as I’d painted him in my imaginarium.

I will miss the initial days of our little story, where I looked forward to receiving messages from him, where we never ran out of things to say to one another, and where our very beings were so aligned that there was never any room for question. But beyond that, he gave me nothing but the promise of a fantasy. He played with my feelings carelessly and excused his poor and inconsistent behaviour constantly. He had to control the narrative, and even after a mutual breakup, he managed to make me feel like I was the one who’d been broken up with. We’d emotionally bonded over a lot of his past traumas and that created a false sense of closeness.

I’ve read somewhere that it’s not about how someone feels about you, what matters is how someone makes you feel about yourself. I never felt like I could be myself in his presence and it’s heartbreaking knowing that I put myself through that for as long as I did. Though it’s been hard to leave, my journal entries speak the hard truth. That there has never been a moment where I have felt certain about him. Next time, I need to trust my intuition more. Because if something doesn’t feel right, it usually isn’t.

It’s taken a while for my heart to catch up to what my mind already knew. That there was something dark lurking beneath the charming facade of this quiet, introspective man. I’m glad I got out when I did, because I don’t know who I would have become if this continued on. The past week has been filled with a lot of self reflection, and I’ve collapsed in tears after asking a million unanswerable questions. But moving on is a choice, and the first step is accepting that things did not work out irrespective of the reason. I’ve asked myself two important questions to keep me grounded when my thoughts start to loop: Was I happy in the relationship? Did I feel like I could be 100% myself? The answer to both is no, and that’s all that matters.

I once thought he could have been my great love, but I now realise he came into my life for a reason. To teach me some important lessons about myself and relationships. Next time, I’m not settling for anything less than I deserve, because I am enough. I should have seen the warning signs earlier but I won’t make the same mistakes again.