In February, my phone was ablaze with the latest revelation in my cousin’s breakup. We had been rallying around the 28-year-old in recent weeks after his girlfriend of two years dumped him without warning or explanation, leaving him shattered and in shock.
He was railing against the new reality, struggling to accept that the woman he believed he would spend forever with was truly gone, and that he might never know why. And then a screenshot, taken by a friend before the breakup, found its way to him, establishing that she had been cheating.
The makeshift support wagon veered from confused to affronted as our text threads flooded with reassurances about him having dodged a bullet, along with the requisite assassination of her character. Everyone batted around the same questions he was now desperate to answer: How could she let it get that far? If she was that unhappy, why not end it sooner? Why couldn’t she have just been honest?
I scrolled in silence, thumbs hovering, then retreating. My stomach recoiling with every sling of mud. Because the questions being floated were fair — and all too familiar. Because I thought I already knew every answer this young man sought from his supposedly coldhearted ex. Because 26 years earlier, I was her.
I had been in love for more than two years with a young man who was, in every regard, one to bring home to Mom. He and I were both younger than my cousin, not yet 20, but already all the things my cousin and his girlfriend had been: mutually respectful, universally compatible, Disney Channel adorable. Everyone saw us going the distance.
Until I cheated. Not in the seedy, lust-fueled way that so often springs to mind, but more of a slow-brewing attraction that I tried to deny for months until, in the end, I no longer could.
But I didn’t have the words or the courage to tell my boyfriend any of that. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, least of all him. So instead, I blurted out a weak statement of facts: I can’t do this. You didn’t do anything wrong. There’s nothing more to discuss.
Blindsided, my boyfriend broke into shards. Like my cousin, he begged for a compelling reason, a negotiation, a bulleted list of what he could fix. From there, he straight-up refused to accept my resignation, insisting school and a recent health scare had left me too stressed, that I wasn’t currently capable of making clear decisions, and questioned whether I might be having some sort of breakdown.
I kept shaking my head, wondering what I was supposed to tell him. The truth? That without searching, I had found someone, and now everything I thought I understood about love and how “right” was supposed to feel turned out to be totally, indisputably wrong? What would that have accomplished besides compounding the pain? I’ll never know.
Breaking up was the right decision, and I accepted that the price of making it was to forever brand myself the villain in this story — not only my ex’s version, but my own. The guilt and shame of falling in love with one man while still being loved by another, of hurting a good person and then lying about why, letting everyone including myself down in the process, never fully left me.
In the weeks that followed the breakup, I felt unburdened to an unnerving degree, awash in a hyper-oxygenated sensation of being free, but didn’t believe I deserved it. I couldn’t help second-guessing the new happiness I was forging. How much longer before I lived to regret it? When would karma collect its due? I felt like an impostor, walking around like some morally decent person instead of the lying cheater within who wanted too much and refused to fight her own feelings hard enough.
Years later, I went on to marry that other man, the one who had changed everything. Our love has proved unstoppable for 26 years. Yet a cobwebbed corner inside me has feared myself of being flawed all along. Somehow incapable — whether from my DNA, my disposition, my parents’ divorce? — of being satisfied with a perfectly good thing. Time and again I have wondered: Is it only a matter of time before my faulty wiring sets this beautiful life on fire?
Once a cheater, always a cheater.
Watching my cousin sift through the ruins, I couldn’t help but examine my own past anew. I flashed back to all the gushing discussions during which my ex, along with our friends, took our happily ever after as inevitable. And for the first time, I noticed the one person steeped in silence throughout: me.
I flipped through our last full year together (out of a total of less than three), where we bickered more than we laughed, our smiles no longer reaching our eyes, both of us waiting on things to magically get good again. I recalled all the times I did try to voice my doubts, suggesting repeatedly — albeit too softly — that maybe we had a problem, at which point another dozen roses would arrive along with finger-wagging reminders that love can’t always be rainbows, and real relationships take work.
Remembering 19-year-old me, I saw no traces of a scheming witch, just a scared kid navigating one of life’s hardest conversations without a script in a world that kept insisting she was lucky, that nobody strikes gold twice, that good girls don’t dare ask for more when they’ve already been handed plenty.
I saw a gun-shy girl, an overabundance of caution, a brittle conscience that didn’t break sooner because some lines don’t appear until after you’ve crossed them. A person who, in waiting to be absolutely sure before causing irreparable harm, wasn’t being malicious — and anyway, when is the right moment to crush a perfectly good heart? What box on the calendar is best for bulldozing a dream, leveling a good person who has shown you nothing but kindness?
Falling out of love wasn’t premeditated. I didn’t yet know how much I didn’t know about what love could and should hold until it started seeping through cracks I had spent months pretending not to see (and had been told weren’t there). For better or worse, I didn’t tell my ex-boyfriend there was already someone else when we broke up, because my decision was made regardless and leaving that part out was the best way I could think of to limit the damage.
I spent most of my adult life believing one bad thing made me, in part, a bad person. I anchored myself to a single loathed fact — that I had hurt someone — while never acknowledging the courage it took at that age (or any age) to reach, with no guarantee, for something bigger than a series of checks down a list and the absence of mistreatment. To have an unbearable conversation too late instead of never, but nonetheless before a ring, a candlelit reception, two mortgages or a custody hearing.
Walking away when my attempts to speak went unheard, refusing to stay in a version of myself that no longer existed for the sole purpose of making another person happy — I understand now that these are not things bad, broken people do.
If it should ever come to it, they are what I would want my daughter to do.
All these years later, by the light of the phone in my lap, I forgave myself. Grown-up me, though far from proud, finally made peace with what I had done.
Nonetheless, I hated that my cousin was hurting. A few days later, I sat across from him at my dining room table, poured him a cup of tea, and tried to explain as best I could what I believed his ex-girlfriend might someday wish she could say to the man whose heart she broke: Hurting him was the hardest thing she ever had to do. She held off as long as she could.
While she may have done an awful thing, I told him, he wasn’t in love with an awful person.
Being blindsided is agonizing, but she was seeing clearly enough for them both.
In time, he will be fine, then so much better. Because for as long as you’re still asking the questions — Is this right? Am I happy? Are we good? — the answer is probably no. When it’s yes, you don’t find yourself asking at all.
She never wanted to be the villain in his story. She only needed to be the heroine of her own.
Rachel Stone, a writer who lives near Toronto, is the author of the novel “The Blue Iris.”
Modern Love can be reached at [email protected].
To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.
Want more Modern Love? Watch the TV series, sign up for the newsletter and listen to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify. We also have two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”
The post I Couldn’t Tell Him Why We Had to Break Up appeared first on New York Times.
