In one of our earliest conversations, I told my friend Usi that I made a mistake by not getting my heart broken as a teenager.
This was true.
I had been an unlicensed relationship therapist for a number of years before this, and while I generally gave friends good advice—because I had read quite a bit and observed enough relationships to know what worked and didn’t—I had trouble fully understanding people in relationships. I figured this was because I had never had skin in the game, not since I was a teen and realised after a brief attempt at romance that I was capable of unwittingly being the bad guy.
So whenever people opened up to me about heartbreak, it befuddled me a bit as I had nothing similar to relate it to. I always attempted empathy, but I didn’t really understand.
This lack of understanding and experience with a broken heart was something I liked for a time and eventually came to take a strange pride in. I liked that I had an unbroken streak, an emotionally clean slate if you will.
At some point though, it started to concern me that my heart had never been broken. My reluctance to participate in relationships had protected me from the emotional turbulence I’ve watched people experience, but it had also robbed me of the insulation that exposure to previous breakfast provided against future breakfast.
What if I got my heart broken for the first time later in life and never recovered because I never developed the skills to handle it? How would I conduct myself?
Such and such were my concerns.
•⋅⋅•
In the last two years, I’ve mentioned to friends once or twice that I was/am interested in getting into a relationship. They don’t take me seriously.
Why?
Because I’m a flaker.
One minute I’m expressing my interest in romance; the next, I am sighing with exhaustion at the idea of being with anyone because I don’t see the point [see: I wrote about it here]. It’s like my relationship with Usi’s book club. Every month, I swear that this is the month I finally attend. Every month, I can’t bring myself to leave my house even though I want to.
But I was serious enough that I read Logan Ury’s book How to Not Die Alone the year before last. Was I afraid of dying alone? No. Well, I suppose every person has a latent fear of dying alone, but that wasn’t why I read it.
As I expressed to a friend once, I was afraid that I was incapable of liking people deeply enough for it to mean anything. My friends interpret this as me being very picky. I’ve never been sure what to make of this reading. I’ve never had a checklist against which I consciously evaluated people, but there might be some truth to it.
In How to Not Die Alone, Ury explains that people generally fall into one of three dating tendencies: romanticiser (believes in the spark; desires a fairytale), maximiser (tries to make the absolute best decision; fears choosing the wrong person), or hesitater (doesn’t feel ready; will only consider dating after they {insert excuse}).
I have the interesting luck of being both maximiser and hesitater.
Through the years, those with a vested interest in my romantic life have often sighed in exasperation whenever I reported that I still wasn’t seeing anyone. I had a litany of honest excuses: I hadn’t found anyone I liked enough; my romantic interest in people scarcely exceeded two weeks; I didn’t have the mental space or emotional bandwidth for a relationship; I needed some more stability in my life before trying to bring someone into it; our values or ways of seeing the world didn’t mesh; I couldn’t see how I and this person who liked me or who I liked would last long-term—why waste our time? Et cetera, et cetera.
Finally, one of my stakeholders had enough last year and declared that I was just afraid of commitment or getting hurt after I reported that I had lost interest in a babe that stayed in my eyes for nearly a whole ass month. This length was a significant development that had gotten my friend excited about the prospects.
My friend was wrong about this case, as excising my interest in this person was absolutely the right call. But her diagnosis wasn’t completely off the mark.
I have often been upfront with friends about my apprehensions regarding romance. It just seemed a strange proposition that I should put my heart in someone’s hands when they could go ahead and slap it against concrete. It also seemed unfair to anyone that I should express my interest in them knowing I could start to feel stifled the following week.
So. Whenever I was considering a person, I often dismissed the chemicals in my head and thought: what might we look like long-term? Would we last? Do we have enough to keep us together outside the butterflies? Could I be proud of them? Could they be proud of me? Is there some fundamental difference between us that would pose a problem in the future? If the answer was no anywhere, I dismissed the affair immediately. While this might seem reasonable, it is easy to catastrophise anything from such a base if you draw conclusions without giving people a chance. Logan Ury’s advice was to stop doing that, to stop focusing on why I and a person couldn’t work—to attempt, at first at least, to go with the flow.
And so I did.
•⋅⋅•
Last year, I was talking to one friend about getting into a relationship for the plot. She said it reminded her of a time she was looking for heartbreak for character development and I went saaame!!! I, too, had been telling people I was looking for heartbreak for character development.
A few months later, I slid into her DM to tell her my character was under development.
I thought it was funny as not too long before this, I was asking another friend to diagram for me what a heartbreak felt like. No matter what she said, it still seemed odd to me how one could let another person affect them so much. Suddenly, I was experiencing the lite version of some of the things she described.
I had gotten into a relationship despite myself and was determined to see where it would go even though I suspected it. I remember talking to a friend about this prior to engaging and she said, no, don’t embark, and I said, oh no, I will embark. I was very well aware it could end in a bit of hurt, but I was also trying to live what I read. lol I can be so ridiculous.
At the start, it was really nice to have reciprocity. I couldn’t believe myself, feeling the way I was feeling. I felt like some teen talking about them because I really liked them. And sometimes I couldn’t stop laughing at myself knowing how much exposure I was creating. But it was lovely while it was lovely.
In my experience, the end of a relationship is not a hurtful thing. It’s that limbo where the atmosphere has changed and you lose your certainty, where the enthusiasm that used to greet you stills into dry paint; you start to feel like a bother, like coughing the wrong way will splatter the eggshells you’re walking on. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. You can tell they’ve lost interest, but they’re refusing to let the shoe make full contact with the ground without your nudge. The limbo is the hurtful place, and the algorithm can smell it from yesterday.
If there’s anything I’ve never been shy about making fun of myself about, it’s my love life (or the absence of it). I found myself laughing when poco a poco, I was assaulted by those ridiculously well-timed and gradual influx of posts that paint in real colour the winding up of a relationship, those moments when you now know for sure that your partner is drifting / has drifted away and all that’s left is the potential fool you could make of yourself trying to hold together what has fallen apart.
Once I started to notice this shift, it felt a bit odd to raise it and realise I was the only one unsettled by it. My natural instinct when I am not wanted is to excuse myself without making a scene, but it took me a second to do so here. I needed a third party to verify I wasn’t hallucinating the shift. I remember calling my sister one time to get her assessment because I wanted to be certain it wasn’t simply my instinct to self-preserve at work.
My unconscious drive to never overestimate my importance in anyone’s life has often resulted in feedback that I was too detached, too wall-building, too arms-lengthy in how I interacted with others, too often giving people the illusion of closeness and swatting it. I have a radar that’s hypersensitive to even the slightest drop in temperature: I’m always a comfortable distance away before the room turns cold.
My hesitation to let things go was new for me because, usually, no matter how much I cared, I also really didn’t. Not this one though. I found myself laughing every now and then because I couldn’t believe my eyes, or my brain. What do you mean I liked someone enough for it to hurt me?
Anyway.
I ended things amicably. I could have attempted to try very hard and work on it, but I knew this was a losing game. The disconnect stemmed from more fundamental differences between us that we glossed over at the start. Plus I wasn’t about to become one of those fellows I cringe at, who stay too long where they are not desired, begging for crumbs—of affection, of effort. I am not unloved at home.
•⋅⋅•
I’ve occasionally told friends that the reason I was so guarded and dismissive of relationships was that I knew if I liked someone enough to let myself go, I could really go, and that could really hurt. Every time I said this, they crinkled their noses because they didn’t believe I had proper feelings. So this wind-up was a tad exciting because I could now say, see: I told you I was capable of being hurt.
Sometimes I am annoyed with myself that I can no longer say I don’t know what breakfast is, but the annoyance is a trifling thing.
I thought it was an interesting experience. For one, I know that so far, I can trust myself to take my own advice and never stay where my footing is unsure. I also thought it was interesting that my belief in communication being principal wavered when I realised how hard it can be to not feel like you’re yarning dust when your sense of security is gone.
I think the most important thing this experience did for me was hold up a mirror.
One of the reasons I found it as funny and surprising as I did was that I was used to being on the other end of the stick. Because I scarcely liked people enough, I was often blasé about being liked. While I was never intentionally cold, sometimes I could tell my insufficient chalance was causing some hurt, but I didn’t understand why or how that felt. There are still gaps in my understanding, but at least I can empathise better.
I also know that I am not incapable of care. All the ways I thought I was too avoidant to care, I did. So much so that it made me read another book to understand this new part of myself.
Best regards.
Here’s something relevant I read this week:
i leave when i don’t feel wanted - whispers of oizys.