So, one year ago, I was preparing to take my boyfriend home for Thanksgiving to meet the rest of my family. He'd already met my parents (who were sure he was THE one), but now he was going to meet my siblings and their families. To be completely honest, I was totally nervous. It was a 10 hour drive to my sister's, and we wouldn't have a break from each other for almost a week...that's a lot of time alone with me.
I was sure that by the end of it, he'd be running for the hills, and despite one fight, it went pretty well Now, one year later, I'm preparing to spend the holiday alone again. I feel like failure, but more than that, I feel alone. I believed it was real, but as it turns out, when things got tough, he completely cut me off.
Of course, the relationship was far from perfect, but I loved him and I was in it for the long haul. Even after he hit me. I did everything I could to keep the relationship going. I was the one who initiated a conversation to try to sort out why he hit me and how we could move forward from there. I was the one who saw my own need for counseling because I knew that, even in the most minute way, I contributed to the ongoing problem that led up to the slap. I was the one who kept the conversation going, trying to rebuild something I thought was worth fighting for. I was the one who spent time trying to figure out what I wanted and tried to communicate that to him. When that led him to stop talking to me, I was the one who reached out to apologize for asking for something I wasn't willing to do too.
He accepted my apology, of course, and even took some responsibility for how things went wrong, though I'm pretty sure he still saw it as all my fault. He did decide that he wanted to start over, and I went along, believing that he really did want a fresh start, that he had really changed, but as soon as I questioned his feelings, he was out. Done. Finished. I think it was in that moment of reading his text (yep, he broke up with me via text) that I realized he never really loved me. I think he wanted to, to have someone to take care of him, to be with him so he wouldn't be alone, but as soon as he was unhappy, that was it.
Honestly, maybe I should have sensed it. I mean, I've always been the one to cut people out when they hurt me, but now I was one the other side of it, and it sucked. All the unknowns, they why's. But the worst thing was knowing that he was going to blame me for everything. When it comes right down to it, everything, including the slap will be my fault.
When he tells his friends, people I've spent time with and genuinely liked, about the break up, I'll play the part of the bad guy. He'll find a way to excuse slapping me, and I'm pretty sure that my mental health will be front and center in his story (yep, I suffer from depression, social anxiety, and I'm pretty sure some form of early onset dementia :P). That really shouldn't surprise me, though, because I spent the last 8 months listening to him tell stories about his mom, cousin, and friends, and in every story, he was the victim. They all had way more problems than he does and he was really only involved with any of them because he felt obligated to be. That's when I realized, that that's exactly what he was doing with me. He put up with me because he wanted to be married, and he didn't care to who as long as he had someone to take care of him.
He saw me as nothing more than an ends to a means, and yet I was hopelessly in love with him. I've tried so hard to just move on, accept defeat, but I can only think about how unlovable I am. I mean, if I can't make a relationship work with a blind guy, how will any other guy love me.
I desperately want to reach out to him, but I know that it would only serve to feed my selfish desire for closure. I want to yell, scream, rage at him, but that would only give him more ammunition against me. Maybe the worst part is that his friends will accept blindly what he tells them. He'll make me sound so terrible that they'll just coddle him and tell him how lucky he is to have gotten out when he did. I have to live with that, every day and it hurts. Mostly because I know that none of these people are really doing him any good, because they're allowing him to continue to live in a world where he is the only victim and never does anything wrong. That's a world I lived in far too long and it was a lonely, bitter place.
It took Ron White to finally make me see the error of my ways. He was telling a story about doing a show at Ft.Polk. He said that when he mentioned the number of men stationed there (about 40, 000), a woman yelled out, "everyone of them's a bad f&^$" His response hit me hard. He said, "You know I would think after about 39, 000 times, you'd start to go, 'Maybe it's me. Maybe I need to read a book.'" As soon as I heard that, I realized, I was the common denominator in every relationship that had gone sour, and it honestly changed how I relate to people (well, that along with The Peacemaker book by Ken Sande). I try to see my fault, identify it, apologize and move forward.
I want to believe that eventually, one day he'll see himself as more than a victim, but it seems obvious that no one is going to point that out to him. I'm pretty sure that so many people tried to point that out to me, but it only became true for me when I finally saw it for myself. I hope he gets there, but I'm pretty sure that just my own selfish desire for vindication.
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