In Order to Heal, I Had to Hurt
You’re not crying, I’m crying!
Not to be dramatic, but this year has been the worst of my adult life.
The Cliff’s notes are these: In January, my relationship started crumbling in a way that finally, after months of slow erosion, felt irreversible and unignorable. Things that had previously been bubbling up as intermittent fights now merged into what felt like one continuous fight with silently agreed upon day-long breaks that existed to keep us both from pulling the rip cord.
When things felt like they were really going south, the worst feeling wasn’t that it was actually happening, but that it all just felt so clichéd. All the markers of a relationship in its death throes were there: Fighting openly in front of friends and family; behaving outlandishly to try to get a reaction; desperately penning love poems in an effort to course-correct; screaming “I hate you” in the middle of a fight that, I shit you not, was about a broken vacuum cleaner. The worst and grossest part was that I knew that if we didn’t both love our shared apartment so much, we would have ended things months earlier.
Then, in February, our landlords stopped by the house to deliver an eviction notice. They had sold the house under the condition that the buyer’s daughter would move into our unit. We had a few weeks to figure out if we wanted to break up or stay together.
Each of us took on a very different coping mechanism. Mine was to place a vice-like grip on the relationship and try to squeeze every last ounce of potential out of it, looking for some sort of tangible proof that there was something left to work on. Hers was to pretend nothing bad was happening, refuse to talk about it, and stop coming home altogether some nights. You will be shocked — shocked! — to learn that we did not manage to save the relationship.
If there’s some other bizarre parallel timeline where there are commercials for things people don’t want, I am in the one for crying.
And so we broke up. In March, we each moved into our own apartment. Because we agreed to share custody of our dog on a two-week schedule, though, we embarked on a vicious cycle that went…
