i deserved better

oisoubipolar

It’s been almost 5 months since he dropped the bomb on me. The thing is, it wasn’t even really a break up, at least not to him. Don’t you have to actually have a relationship to be broken up with? He was driving me to the train station after we spent a couple days together again. For the most part I’d had a wonderful time, despite his strange, withdrawn behavior for most of it after the first night. He told me he had just started dating someone, and it wasn’t serious, and the reason he acted how he did wasn’t anything I had done. Frankly, I wasn’t hearing all of it at that point. I was in the closest thing to a state of shock I had been in my entire life.

To make a long story short, after sending him an almost-too-long email telling him I wish he’d told me he was seeing someone else before I went to visit him, and that I thought what we had was more than just sex, he replied with a simple “I thought we were just having fun.” He also proceeded to theorize this “misunderstanding” was based on our difference in age and experience. We both said we were fine with being friends, but after two weeks, I removed him from Facebook, the tool we had used for keeping in touch after meeting and having a 2-night fling when I was studying abroad in Ireland and he in London. I thought this would make getting him over easier and quicker, but the only thing it did was take away the ability to see what he was doing and who we was conversing with, which was probably still beneficial for me.

One of the worst things you can do after a break up, whether you were the one to do the breaking up or you were the one broken up with, is to blame yourself and berate yourself for things you realize you could have done differently. But this is precisely what I did. I asked myself over and over, “Why weren’t you stronger? Why couldn’t you be one of those girls who can sleep with guy and not think anything of it? Why didn’t you ask him if he was dating someone before you went to go see him?” Truth be told, I was that girl at first. I didn’t want to be the stereotypical girl who thinks because she thinks the first guy she sleeps with is going to be one of the great loves of her life, especially if he wasn’t to start with. I told myself it was just sex. But he was the one who seemed to be coming on pretty strong and acting like we were actually friends after. But, after it all ended and I found out the truth, I felt like such an idiot, and a total outcast from the rest of society. We seem to live in such a casual, sex-driven society these days. I don’t really understand the “Friends With Benefits” movement. In the end, I think the focus is more on the benefits than the friend.

And to answer the question, “Why didn’t I ask him before I went to visit him if he was seeing someone?” Well, the way he talked to me, why would I think he was? My biggest mistake was trusting him.

Sometimes I want to contact him and let him know how wrong he was to have done that, because when it all first happened, my emotions were definitely in it, and I gave him way more credit than he deserves. I APOLOGIZED for not having been more upfront that I thought we were headed towards a “relationship” or love. However, I think it’s better if I just let him go rather than open that door of communication again. But now I see that he was lying. About what in total, I’m not 100% sure, but the one thing I would like to ask him is, “If you believed that both of us were in it just for ‘fun,’ why couldn’t you have told me the truth the moment I asked if there was a particular reason you left the bed in the middle of the night and slept on the couch? If I also was just having ‘fun,’ why would it have been a big deal to just tell me right then?" "Why did you wait 36 hours and tell me right before I was about to get on a 5 hour train ride? What do you think I thought about the entire way home?"

After months of ups and downs, crying myself to sleep and beating up on myself, I see it clearly now. This is not about me not being “strong” or “smart” enough. I think the fact that I cared about what he and I had, and that I “fell” for him, is a sign of my humanity. It’s clearly more of a risk to let your heart get involved than to remain unattached, but I’d rather be like that than close myself off and look at a person as only an object of lust. I think in my situation, he owed me a lot more than what he gave me. If it was only about sex with us, we shouldn’t have kept in touch and talked as frequently as we did about non-sex related things. If it’s only about sex for him, then he should keep it that way and try not to blur the lines between a person to have “fun” with and a person he genuinely likes. It makes me laugh now because, it almost felt like he was upset with me for feeling the way I did. Well excuse me, buddy, for actually liking you. If I thought you were just a jackass, I would have treated you that way. But I liked things about you other than when we were physical. How terribly awful of me to do that to you.

I deserved better from him. I know that now. Whether he knows it or not, I do, and that’s the only thing that matters.


-K.