It’s been a few months since running into him. My ex. The one I’d thought would become the great love of my life. I started writing this after all the dreams that followed, but I set it aside. I wanted more distance. He’s popped up in my dreams a couple more times. Same tone, an almost nostalgic sense of our better times; same sense of horror when I awaken. I haven’t allowed myself to savor anything that made me fall in love with him in the first place. In our last years together, my entire focus had been building a wall to create distance and protection. For too long, I’d allowed his good side to slip through cracks, misleading me into trusting and hoping again.
My family and my friends who knew me during that seven-year relationship still know nothing about the abuse I endured. I don’t see any purpose in that. How would they feel to find out they never knew? What might they think of the fact I didn’t reach out while it was happening?
I’ve shared some bits with a couple people I’ve met since that time but mostly in general terms. I don’t want to open things up. I don’t want to be judged, probably not so much by them but by myself. I don’t want to feel the shame again. I knew what was wrong with him, but I stayed. What was wrong with me?
Something positive came from recently running into my ex. One morning, after yet another unwanted dream with him popping up, all sweet and caring, I got on my bike and pedalled out of the city, through suburb after suburb. I was disturbed that the entire tone of the dream had been loving, that my subconscious was intent on showcasing his kinder side and that it had taken so long for me to bolt upright in bed, calling an end to this glossy, fairy-tale version of us.
The ride offered a chance to try to work things through without reaching for the distraction of something on the internet or retreating to the numbing comfort of a bag of microwave popcorn or a stack of blueberry pancakes.
I’ve often reflected on my relationships, trying to pinpoint the things I’d done wrong or could have done better. When reflecting, I focus on my actions and inactions since that’s what is within my control. That’s where I can learn and grow. I’m a big believer in the notion that “history repeats itself.” I feel that, being acutely aware of past lessons, I have a better chance in a future relationship, nixing any repeating cycle.
As I pedalled, I began with safer subject matter. I went through the lessons from the other three relationships when I fell in love. Yes, I knew my mistakes. I was relieved that these mistakes were different in each case. I’m (fairly) confident I have grown and can continue to grow from lessons learned.
Then I allowed myself to consider the relationship that turned out to be abusive. Never an easy reflection. It began, as always, as a destructive rather than constructive exercise. Friendly fire. As I rode farther, I grew tired of beating myself up once more. Blaming myself for staying in that relationship was an old tune I knew by heart. That’s part of the relationship’s legacy, the nagging sense that I’d been weak, pathetic, a doormat. Why had I allowed the abuse?
When you’re repeatedly called useless, the defenses break down. It sinks in. It becomes who you are.
Then my thinking shifted. Fuck blame. Fuck shame.
Somewhere on my ride between Port Moody and Belcarra, I had an epiphany. The demise wasn’t my doing at all. I had loved as much as I possibly could. I’d fully committed. I’d been loyal and supportive. Adhering to “for better or for worse” had been my downfall. I’d perhaps had too much faith, thinking that “worst” would change course, that we could ride it out.
Still, I tried to pinpoint my faults. What were all the things I had done wrong? This is normally a simple exercise. I’m a master at finding fault in myself. One psychiatrist I saw weekly for many months declared on several occasions that I was at a genius level in terms of putting myself down. (Um…thanks?)
No fault this time. I felt elated. Maybe I’d finally discovered that elusive euphoria people always talk about when endorphins kick in during exercise. Maybe I’d just never pedalled hard enough. But no. That was just my reflex response, dismissing the epiphany. My endorphins will always be dormant. What was suddenly clear to me was that the undoing of my longest relationship had not been my doing in any way. In fact, I allowed myself to think of all the things I’d done right. (I won’t go through them here. It’s one thing for me to take a break from putting myself down; it’s quite another to openly praise myself.)
For the first nine months of our relationship, absolutely everything was pure bliss. I’d fallen in love as I should have. We were fully in sync. I didn’t change; he did. I remember the morning he finally let the cracks show. When the tirade ended and he left, I drove to a beach and walked back and forth along the shore, feeling scared and shocked, trying to figure out what I had done wrong because this man I loved could not have snapped for no reason. I had no answers, but I decided to stick with him because that’s what you do in a committed relationship.
“What’s wrong with me?” has been a familiar refrain over the decades. My parents have been married for sixty-one years, my sister for thirty-six, my brother for thirty-two. My best friend has been married for thirty-two years as well, my next closest friends for twenty-six and twenty-seven years. Facebook shows me anniversary pics of others along with Valentine’s celebrations and declarations of devotion and appreciation whenever it’s a spouse’s birthday. I am happy for them, but there’s always a sting. They succeeded in a loving relationship. Obviously, I didn’t.
I know I did all the right things. I was just as loving, just as loyal, just as committed as these people. It was just with the wrong guy. I stuck with him because that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be, that’s what I saw all around me.
You stick with it. You work things out.
It cost me dearly. I was thirty-two when I fell in love with him. For gay men, I feel the thirties are when the time is ripe to settle down. My generation often came out later and the twenties were about messy exploration. Indeed, the first time I fell in love, I was twenty-six and I made plenty of cringe-worthy mistakes, things I can shake my head over or laugh about. It was the equivalent to a much-belated high school or college romance, destined to be a steppingstone to something more mature and secure. The love that followed, still in my twenties, was another that helped ready me for something more. These relationships, along with my own personal growth, prepped me for the relationship I walked into at thirty-two.
It was you; not me.
My epiphany is bittersweet. I’m a single man, but I have a clearer, even fairer, understanding of how I got here. It’s late in coming and it’s accompanied by a sense of regret. I was as committed and loving as any of my friends and family members who are still in relationships. I gave up my thirties to this man and then, due to the abuse, I retreated to a rural setting for ten years, effectively taking myself out of consideration for a viable partnership. Taken together, the wrong guy and then the wrong place sucked up almost two decades of my life, notably “prime time” for romance.
Sometimes you put all you’ve got into a relationship. You love as largely as you possibly can. You keep reminding yourself of that damn vow, “for better or worse” and, because you don’t want to fail, you add on “or worse than worse.” You believe and then you believe again. And again.
Yes, sometimes it’s an evil prince that pops up in the fairy tale. Sometimes hope and belief are misplaced. Sometimes you can’t wring a happily ever after out of the relationship in which you invested the most and gave your all. Sometimes being out of a relationship is the best thing that can possibly happen. Sometimes being safe is the best way to end the story.
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