It was a Sunday evening of June 2015. Seemingly a regular weekend just like any other. Me and my girlfriend were taking the bus back home from my cousin’s birthday celebration. We had moved together for the first time the year before, after 8 years of relationship, our family homes being about 2 and a half hours from each other. Not an easy commute, for sure…
Things had not been smooth in the 6 months leading to that Sunday. The decision to move to our then current home had been taken rather lightly and in a hurry. Sure, we were already 27 and 28 years old, but I’m not sure I was ready to leave my family home. The push came when a friend couple of ours moved together for the first time. Both of them were mine and my girlfriend’s best friends respectively. We actually met each other through them, on the same day they met each other, back in 2006, and started dating formally exactly one month after they did. That already seems like quite an omen.
Each of us already had quite a toxic and complicated relationship with these “best friends” of ours, and while everything was genuinely great in our brand new romantic relationships, the friendship side of things started to get progressively more and more toxic and passive-agressive as the years ensued.
Like I said previously, the one month difference in the formalization of the relationships became an omen. From that point on, everything slowly turned into a competition, without any of us consciously wanting or even realizing it was happening. The problem with that “competition” is that we always somehow fell in second place. They always seemed to achieve goals or reach milestones before we did. They were the “cool kids” with “cooler friends”. They always seemed to do better than us, and in our own sea of insecurities we also felt like they were rubbing it to our face, even when they weren’t (to be fair, a few times it seemed like they really were).
It all came to a climatic convergence in early 2014, when they decided to take the big step of moving together for the first time, you guessed it, before we did. But, there was a plot twist: There was apparently an apartment for rent, identical to the one they just got, on the same building, just one floor above. It was actually my friend himself who convinced me of how great of an idea it was if all us 4 lived together in the same building. We were both musicians and we were actually working on some music together at the time, so this would make it even better, right? Not only that, but for me and my girlfriend this seemed like killing two birds with one stone (I hate that analogy… poor birds man!) It was our chance to a.Move together for the first time and b.Reach a goal almost at the same time they did, so we wouldn’t feel so behind and we could be “as cool”. The red flag was that both things seemed to be equally important for us at that time. We should have seen it coming. We should have known that all the insecurity, all the hostile comments not made, all the toxic communication was gonna blow up in our faces after just a few months of almost sharing a home together, although it wasn’t literally the case.
From the start they were pretty adamant to make friends with the people in the building to prove how cool they were, and we would sometimes be there too… when they wanted us to be there… You see, they were trying to build show an image of themselves to new people. Create it from scratch. I can totally understand that. But that becomes a problem in the presence of two people that knew both of them for more than a decade, so they were basically avoiding our presence when possible. Never explicitly. Just not extending invitations to us. Their friends that lived one floor away…
There was a key fact though: They were the “cooler” people, but we were the “easy” people. And this came to show when it was time to meet the new neighbors, who naturally gravitated towards us. Simply because we didn’t change the focus of every single conversation to talk about how cool our life was. Or maybe because we didn’t insist on making every single event at our home, to try to show how much “cooler” it was compared to the others.
Long story short (although It’s a little too late for that now isn’t it…). Toxic feelings and comments flew back and forth until it took just a set of dumb incidents in the shape of ill-fated comments from both parts to blow everything out of the water. To be completely fair, the four of us screwed up. Both individually and as couples. In a matter of just a couple of days, while trying to sort things out, we said everything that was pressure cooking inside of us at once. In the worst tone and manner possible. Without admitting one single mistake while signaling every tiny single one from the other. Needless to say we halted all communications between both couples after the incidents.
The one little problem was… we still lived in the same building. After a year during which it seemed everything we did was try to “keep up with the Joneses”, life at home was pretty miserable. What’s more, the other 2 couples we had met in the building who we had become friends with, both broke up within months of the conflict. We became trapped in our own home. We started to avoid going out, afraid we were gonna have to bump into our now former-best-friends and face some extremely awkward elevator ride together, or the hold the door open for each other.
My neurotic way of dealing with this new hostility at home was to spend more and more time back at my family home, which was just a rather quick 15/20 minutes bus ride away. I felt safe there. My grandma cooking meals, my younger cousins making stupid jokes, the big backyard which I really missed. Everything was better. But most importantly, I couldn’t bump into anybody there. There was one tiny detail I forgot about: my girlfriend. This was not her family. It was mine. She felt estranged and miserable, and I hardly ever noticed it at the time. My mood towards her was terrible. I would be cranky all the time, and if I saw her being a bit moody at my family house I would get mad at her. After all, how could she not be happy tagging along to come with me every single weekend (sometimes even Saturday and Sunday) to see my (not her) family… jeez…
So this is the timeframe that places us in that bus, on an evening of June 2015. The boring, uneventful bus ride home, with, of course, the looming possibility of running into our former best-friend couple at the door. Suddenly I notice something I never ever noticed before. She is texting, but she seems to be hiding her phone from my sight, tucking it into her sweater leaning it to her side and taking an ocasional quick peak at me to see if I’m looking. I am looking, but our eyes never meet, so she doesn’t realize it. Off the corner of my eye I read just 4 words that make my pressure drop. 4 words that, without me realizing it, set in motion a transformation that would go on until today, with an incredibly positive outcome, but it didn’t start positive. Oh no, it didn’t…
“I dreamed about him”. Those were the words. She was texting her best friend. I knew right away that “him” wasn’t me. I confirmed it when I read a longer paragraph. “we were talking about dreams, but I didn’t tell him I dreamed about him…” That one seemed to hurt even more somehow. Not only was it a dream, but it was also a dream that couldn’t just be talked about casually, it seemed…
I knew who she was talking about. He was a work colleague. She mentioned him a couple of times. A bit more than she would mention other colleagues. She talked to me about some mundane conversations she had with him, about dogs, about family, about weed, about work, etc. They really seemed to get along, but I never worried. I was never the jealous type. Neither was she. But somehow I knew, it was him.
I said nothing on the bus. My face suddenly turned into an iceberg. I waited til we got home. It was about seven blocks that somehow felt like 7 years…
“What’s wrong, are you OK?” she asked. My response was blunt: “Who did you dream about?”.
The human mind is indeed a powerful thing. I remember everything I just described vividly, and I probably will for the rest of my days. But somehow, everything that was spoken after my question is now a blur. Probably because my mind switch to survival mode from that second on. And that my friends, is what ended our relationship. She felt alone. She felt estranged. I was always moody and unpleasant to be around. I would ignore her (or worse, treat her coldly) all day, and then get moody if we didn’t have sex at night, like a spoiled brat. She got attracted to someone else. Someone who actually cared, someone who listened to her. It makes perfect sense… to my present self. Not to my 2015 self, who went straight into panic mode making things so worse, so fast that I’m sure it was pretty painful to watch for her.
Nothing was spared. The “Please don’t leave me’s” the “I’m nothing without you’s” the “I can’t imagine my life without you’s”, the desperate sobbing and kneeling on the floor, begging. All of those things that for some twisted unknown reason we perceive as romantic… There is nothing less romantic or attractive than someone depending on us, if they’re not a child or a pet. Nothing makes you want somebody less than knowing there’s absolutely nothing to their lives if you’re not there.
It was an extremely painful, longer-than-it-should-have-been process. The bus incident happened in June. We broke up in July. She had been processing it by herself for months, I just gave her the final push.
At least I was able to pick myself up somewhat and keep my dignity they day we got together in the old apartment to decide who gets what of all of our stuff. We both worked and it was pretty clear who bought who, so there were absolutely no conflicts with the division. I actually will-powered myself to be stoic that day. Positive and welcoming. We gave each other a big hug before we left the apartment for the last time and I finished moving back to my family home.
It’s ironic. After a whole year pathologically wanting to spend more time in that house, I wanted to move out the second I unpacked in my old room. Don’t get me wrong, my mom was relatively easy to live with, still at 28, but there’s just no turning back from having your own home, even if was a troubled one initially…
I texted my ex a few times to arrange some final errands regarding the rent contract. Each time I seemed to remind her of how difficult the process was for me, somehow. Until one day my mind clicked. From one second to the other I just realized I was humiliating myself more with every text. I then, cold-turkey, blocked her from all of my socials, stopped texting, and deleted her contact. Shock therapy.
I woke up the next day to the rest of my life. Everything seemed so scary and new. I was completely hyped up at 10 to then become extremely melancholic at 11. And then it happened. For the first time I got into self-help/self-improvement content. It all seemed so stupid to me just the year before, but now I felt like I desperately needed it. It all started with a couple of e-books about coping with break-ups and it evolved into a few books about confidence and self-worth. Many things I seemed to be surely lacking for the last few years. It may seem dumb for some people but that kind of content got me out of a very big hole I was in. A hole that caused my two closest (though not so healthy) relationships to collapse in a matter of 6 months. I started to dress better, walking with my head straight, talk louder, had a few dates (tho nothing came to much), I had very deep conversations with many of my closest friends and relatives. Simply put, I started feeling better about myself. By myself. Alone, but not lonely. July 2015 truly felt like a rebirth. The biggest so far in my 35 years of life.
And then one day after a few months it happened. Out of the blue, my ex texted me. She saw a few pics I uploaded on Instagram, even though I was never an excessive user. She saw my change, and liked it. My intention of course was never for her to see my change. It was in fact, the decision of not trying to reach out to her anymore that spearheaded that change. I actually blocked her from Instagram. Not in a bad spirit, just knowing it would be painful to see her moving on. She actually saw my posts through a mutual friend. She told me she missed me. She told me she could see I had changed and she really liked it. Life’s funny. After an entire month of purely begging her not to leave me, now I was actually hesitating getting her back. And letting her know about it. I wasn’t playing hard. This was not a strategy. I legitimately felt really good about myself alone, and I intended to remain that way. I told her this.
She started to find excuses to text me back, telling me she wanted to see me. It wasn’t pitiful. It wasn’t self-demeaning. It felt good. It felt good to be wanted. Not needed. We started chatting regularly, casually. We didn’t get back together. We actually started from scratch. We were almost literally different people. So free from past troubles. We started to become friends again, and eventually we felt for each other. Again, from scratch. It felt nothing like before. It felt amazing. The first time around we met as two 20 year-olds. Now we were almost 30, and it showed. It seems we needed to break up to get rid of all the baggage of immaturity we were carrying since we first met. Now we were two ambitious adults, with individually interesting and complex lives, looking to share them with each other.
We took our time. It took almost literally a year before we considered ourselves a couple again. Everything shifted. We discarded our old anniversary, knowing it really didn’t mean anything in this new chapter. We actually have no anniversary date now. Things were so progressive and natural that there was no one key important day to the whole journey, and that feels so much better.
This “second chapter” of our relationship is now almost as long as the first one, but infinitely more beautiful. We had the best 7 years of our lives since we got back together. Moved to a different home in a different city that we still love to this day, adopted two pups and are now planning on having children sometime next year.
These were also the greatest years of our lives individually. We both found passions we didn’t know we had, had some great job opportunities and just created the best versions of ourselves we’ve ever been. Both physically and mentally.
I guess the takeaway from this story is that sometimes you just need to really screw up to learn what you’re doing wrong. You need something blunt and in your face. Sometimes that’s the only way we see things. The good news is that once we see them, there really is no way back.
2015 was the beginning of the rest of my life. The best years of my life, by a long stretch. A big bang from which I still feel the expansion waves today.
