Why is it, that after the agony of ending a relationship and a period of great torment, your mind decides then to really start confusing you? It took me months to come to the decision to leave my husband. Months of thinking constantly about whether I could be satisfied with this relationship for the rest of my life. Months of picking apart every iota of the relationship trying to figure out if it could be saved. The damage to me seemed irreversible and permanent, and it also seemed that I was in a lose/lose situation.
I could end my unhappy relationship which would leave me without the man I’ve spent 12 years loving, without my companion, without a part of myself. It would leave me alone in an adult world that I had never participated in. Lose. On the other hand I could stay. I could keep the love of my life, keep the man that had upset me with the same behaviour over and over during 4 years of cohabitation. Keep the man that would lose him temper over the smallest things, causing the biggest arguments and ruining whole weekends. I could carry on lying in bed next to my love while fantasising about what a different relationship could be like if I wasn’t with him. Lose.
So I picked what I saw as the lesser of two evils. I thought a life spent thinking ‘what if I’d been brave enough to leave, to see what else is out there?’ was worse than not even trying. I believed that the resentment that was creeping in would fester and grow until I hated him. The thought of instead regretting that I hadn’t stayed was almost equally terrifying. Almost.
So it’s done. Decision made, and time to try and move on. Why now does the mind seem to so easily forget that there was anything wrong with the relationship? Why does my mind insist that he’s ‘the one’? When I don’t even believe there is such a thing? Instead of thinking constantly during the breakup about the times he’d upset me, the times he’d promised ‘never again’, now my mind has decided instead to replay our happiest moments. I am reminded of how intimately we know each other, and bombarded with flashbacks of a blissful honeymoon in Morocco. I see only his good qualities, us at school at 16 with no worries and how we have the same sense of humour.
We have been completely separated for 3 months and now I have to force myself to remember why. When I am daydreaming about holding hands with him as we used to do in the cinema, or how we’d talk in the kitchen every evening when I was cooking dinner, I have to force myself to stop. Yes those things happened. And yes there were many good aspects of the relationship, but there was a reason I was so unhappy before the split. I was so focussed on the negatives prior to ending the relationship that I could hardly see the positives that now haunt me. Perhaps he was so ingrained in my life that it will take many more months before I can be free of this. Perhaps this is so traumatic for me that my mind is trying desperately to get me to go back to my comfort zone. I know when I am being my rational self that the reasons are real. And I know that while I still love him and there are so many parts of our relationship that I will miss, that negatives caused me to feel trapped, resentful, hurt and restless. Rarely is a relationship all good or all bad and most people deal with peaks and troughs. I hope that I recognised that my relationship was broken before we got to the point of hating each other, and despite what my mind tells me, it wasn’t just a trough.
romancerebecca 