My heart is broken, and it feels like it’s all my fault.
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Hi Hera,
I have just gone through a very traumatic first breakup, where I was blindsided by my ex.
I’m 24 years old and had been on dating apps for a while, but the dates I went on didn’t progress to a relationship due to a feeling of incompatibility from either me, the other person or both. No terribly hard feelings, personally, I didn’t want to rush into a relationship that didn’t feel right. This one did feel right. That’s what I felt, and he felt the same. We just got each other, we spoke every day and spent almost every weekend together. He was a couple of years older than me and had been in a few relationships himself, and he also really touted how communication and honesty is fundamental in a relationship to him.
However, we’d had a difficult conversation a few months before the breakup where I brought up feeling like there was a dip in affection from his side. At the beginning, it felt like he was a lot more verbal and physical about showing his affection to me, but nine months in it felt like I was the only one initiating hugs, kisses and words of affirmation. Still a lovely relationship besides this one thing. He explained that he showed affection in other ways like spending time with me and being in each other’s company, and he’d recently changed jobs and moved back to his home city so those were stressing him out a bit. I thought that was fair and that I could compromise on it. Relationships involve compromise/what you’re willing to give and take, right?
The conversation felt like it brought us closer, and the next few months felt better. Every now and then, though, little things would resurface my feelings about a lack of affection: I’d go to put my hand on his arm to gently hold him when we were about to fall asleep, and he’d roll away; he’d say my music taste was shit, in a joking way, but he also honestly didn’t like it; the still lacking initiation of hugs, kisses and positive comments about how I look etc. I started having negative thoughts about leaving him, and even blindsiding him myself.
I told him these thoughts and how I still felt a lack of affection, and broke down into tears saying I was a terrible person for even thinking them because he didn’t deserve that. I reiterated multiple times I knew they were wrong and would never act upon them, but because they were stemming from the relationship and having an affect on me I thought he deserved me to be honest with him. He thanked me and told me I was strong for speaking up and strong for not acting upon them. He suggested speaking to my family, or potentially getting therapy. I was really unsure and scared about opening up to anyone else about it, so we agreed to put a pin in it and talk about it again after we’d processed the convo. I felt like we’d grown even closer again by being vulnerable and showing trust. Two weeks later, he sent me a text saying that what I said had hurt him, that he was constantly worrying if I was gonna break up with him, that I should probably get professional help and not contact him again. I was promptly blocked on all platforms.
Needless to say, I’m destroyed. I constantly go over how I should’ve told someone else first, not been so emotional, been more proactive about asking if he was OK in the weeks following, got onto therapy quicker etc. I think about how I would’ve reacted if someone had told me that, would I have been strong enough knowing that information to feel secure? Could we have ever been happy and secure after that? I don’t know how I can ever be truly vulnerable with someone I should call my best friend again.
Sincerely,
A Lost Soul
Dear Lost Soul,
I’m sorry your heart is broken. It’s completely normal to feel like you’ve been pushed out of a moving helicopter into a wild dog enclosure, and a group of jackals are gnawing on the soft jelly of your heart.
There are a lot of points I’d like to address in this letter, but before we get into the specifics, it sounds like this relationship ultimately wasn’t good for you, and even though the break-up hurts, it was good that it ended when it did, because you deserve someone who makes you feel extravagantly loved.
When you’re reeling in the aftermath of a break-up, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. You think, “if only I’d quietly swallowed all my wants and needs, we’d be happier than ever.” But there are some problems that aren’t worth fixing.
For the record, breaking up with someone isn’t necessarily “blindsiding” them. Blindsiding is when you convince Erik to give up his immunity necklace at tribal council and then write his name down, even though you all swore you were voting for Parvati. Reevaluating whether or not to continue a relationship, especially in the early stages, is a normal thing to do, and people your age aren’t obliged to go through months of excruciating couples counselling before pulling the plug. There’s nothing nefarious about a sudden break-up. Just because your partner is surprised by the news, it doesn’t mean it would have hurt any less if they’d had extensive prior warning. Telling someone you’ve been considering breaking up with them when you don’t want to break up with them is admittedly a very risky move, unless you’re issuing some kind of ultimatum. But I don’t actually think this break-up was your fault.
It sounds like you took your ex’s requests for honest communication very literally. However, many people are optimistically delusional about how much honest communication they’re actually able to handle.
Recently, everyone at my workplace was asked to contribute advice to a newlywed wedding card, and there were some funny discrepancies in the type of advice from different age brackets. All the younger people wrote healthy and uplifting things like “communication is KEY”, whereas the advice from people who had been married for over two decades was more along the lines of “sometimes it’s good to go to bed angry in order to teach them a lesson!!!’
Communication and honesty are important, but there’s also something to be said for the savage boomer relationship-realpolitik. Good intentions don’t always translate to good outcomes, and sometimes the better part of healthy communication is knowing when to shut up. Over the years, you learn when to sugarcoat a difficult truth and when to serve it on the rocks. When to disingenuously apologise and when to ruthlessly stand your ground. Which hills you’re willing to die on, and when it’s better to have some spaghetti and call a truce.
What I’m trying to say is that we are often overly confident in our ability to handle criticism, and that learning how to discuss problems with a partner is a slow and laborious process, full of small humiliations, errors of judgment, and hurtful misunderstandings. It’s OK to get things wrong. That’s how you learn. Nobody is born into this world knowing how to have perfect relationships. It’s something you get better at with patience, good intentions and a lot of trial and error, and even then you’re still going to fuck it up sometimes. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
However. There are some problems which aren’t worth solving. Which brings us to your break-up.
It sounds like you are hurt, bewildered and taking on the lion’s share of the blame. But honestly, this relationship doesn’t sound like it was worth saving. It sounds like you were feeling profoundly unloved and starved for affection. The fact that this was already a recurring issue, and you’d only been together for a year, rings all kinds of alarm bells.
When people say relationships are all about compromise, they usually mean “I choose to live in the countryside, even though I have debilitating hayfever, because my beloved wife is a renowned owl biologist,” or “fine, we’ll spend Christmas with your horrible stepfather, but I’m not going to another monster truck rally, I really mean it this time Cathy.” They do not mean you should stoically accept feeling fundamentally unloved by your partner because they are incapable of showing you basic affection.
Feeling loved in a relationship isn’t negotiable. It’s a dealbreaker. If you had swallowed your hurt feelings and said nothing, all that would have accomplished is slowly eroding your self-esteem and given you a lifelong romantic paranoia. Unless you’re pathologically needy to the point of sabotaging every relationship you’ve ever been in, wanting to feel loved is not a problem to be solved or something you need to seek therapy for. It’s the basic cornerstone of any relationship, and your partner asking you to outsource the problem to a mental health professional suggests they’re an emotional coward who isn’t capable of meeting your basic needs.
You deserve to be with someone who is proud of you and makes you feel secure. Who responds enthusiastically to your bids for love, with genuine affection and kindness. Who doesn’t make you feel delusional or needy for wanting more. It sounds like your ex wasn’t that person, and no amount of “honest conversation” was ever going to fix that.
It sounds to me like your ex’s heart wasn’t fully in it, and for all their high-minded principles about honesty, they weren’t brave enough to come clean. Either that, or they’re a Victorian caricature, who believes that couples should only tell their partner they love them once a year, with a sternly worded telegram on a wedding anniversary.
Either way, this was never going to be enough for you. You sound like a person with an abundance of love to give, and you deserve to have that love freely reciprocated. The lesson you should take away from this relationship is not that you should have been less honest. It’s that in order to thrive and feel secure, you need to be with someone who is capable of loving you with reckless abandon. This isn’t an outlandish request. There are plenty of other people in this life who don’t dole out love like a WW2 butter ration, but are capable of giving it joyfully and freely.
There is nothing you could have done to have “fixed” this relationship. You would only have prolonged the inevitable. The only thing therapy would have done is help you realise this sooner.
You say you worry that you won’t be able to be vulnerable again. I’m sure that feels true right now. But the heart is resilient! It’s impossible to be fully vulnerable with someone who’s not actually willing to meet you halfway. You have to first be able to trust they are fully committed and present, and have your back. When you have that trust, the vulnerability will follow.
It’s OK to be hurt that this didn’t work out. Be patient. Go to the duck pond and have a good weep. But don’t beat yourself up. It’s not accurate to say the relationship didn’t work out because you fucked it up. It didn’t work out because it wasn’t meeting your needs, and was probably never going to. One day, you will meet someone who makes you feel truly loved, and you will realise you were right to hold out for something better.
