It was a physical shock to my system. The guy that I had in the back of my mind, the one with the kind eyes and good manners, has a girlfriend. I was caught off guard when I saw the photo as I passed it on my timeline. I felt my body go into crisis mode. My hands sent frantic texts in all caps, my eyes started tearing up and my body started shaking to the point where I couldn’t hold my hands straight.
All the promises, all the tentative plans, all the long text messages, the conversations and the phone call — all of it flashed back to me in an instant. All of it meant nothing now, all of the possibilities we discussed vanished in a heartbeat. The worst had come to fruition. My biggest fear has come true.
He’s going to forget about me and meet someone else.
I was trapped in this dangerous parenthetical that was always in the back of my mind, always lingering when I would compose, then delete a text message. Fearing that I was being either too clingy or too distant, I would tiptoe on a line of caution. Timing mixed with distance made me cognizant of every fear I had.
People are unpredictable and they hurt us, sometimes without even thinking about it. I wasn’t upset because he had a girlfriend, I was upset because he hadn’t told me himself and kept me in the dark. I was upset that I had to find out by just signing onto Facebook that night. I felt betrayed, foolish and idiotic all at the same time, as if to ask how I could have not known. How could I have been so blind?
When I asked him about it, his responses were rational and planned, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. As if rationality should always trump emotion. I have always preached openness, honesty and vulnerability as imperative parts of any good relationship, no matter the nature of that relationship. The disregard for the trust that I had for him spoke louder than his responses — something was broken that couldn’t be fixed.
They say time heals all wounds. I think that is true, but sometimes one needs more than time to trust again, to be open again. To fix what is truly broken is to make a conscious decision to try wholeheartedly and fully. To be open and vulnerable is to take a risk and to trust another person. To trust that they won’t hurt you in the ways you’ve been hurt in the past is an even bigger risk. Having someone know all the ways they can hurt you is a scary thing. When you become open, you open up more possibilities for others to hurt you. Sometimes you just have to find those who are worth that risk, and even then, it’s not certain they won’t hurt you.
I don’t know if he’ll ever know the extent of how much I hurt that day, or if he’ll ever know how foolish I felt holding onto a vision of something that wouldn’t come true. Possibility is a strange thing to mourn. Holding onto bits and pieces of messages and conversations seems futile, but sometimes it’s all one has.
However, I still refuse to be a pessimist through all this. Yes, I will trust less easily, and the walls that I was letting down from the last relationship are going to be rebuilt in order to protect myself. I don’t know what’s going to come next. I don’t know how easily I will be able to open up again.
My worst fear had come true. The worst thing in this situation that could possibly happen did in fact happen. There’s almost a release of tension now, a release of all of those fears and feelings I was holding onto. I can start to move on and stop holding onto a fantasy. I can start focusing on the people and things that make me happy — my sisters, my friends, my family, my half-marathon training and, one day, running the world in high heels and a tailored blazer.
Self-preservation, I have been told, is the No. 1 human drive.
Meredith loves telling stories and pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw, minus the man and comfy NYC apartment. She, however, eats enough brunch to cover all six seasons. When she's not drowning in 16th-century literature, she can be found lamenting over the bad grammar and bad boys in her middle school diary.
Find her on twitter @merewilsh or email her mwilsher@bu.edu with all your love musings or questions.
