Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Why Did I Break Up With Her? / What IS Love? (Part 1)

From a purely logical point of view, I feel like the one best piece of information that would help me get K back, would be a sound, clear, reasonable explanation of why we broke up (I broke up with her but she was in agreement by then). And also a clear explanation of why I think a second round would be completely fundamentally different. Different from the ground up.

So lets start at the beginning. I know, hows about a graphic.

This chart represents my 33.5 years of existence. The red portions represent the time I've spend in relationships. The time K and I were together, was longer than all previous relationships combined. The reason I point this out, is to point out just how inexperienced I was at that 5th month of being in a relationship. And of course, all months after that. 

Moving on from there, lets talk about love for a little bit. Most people have been in love. My biggest love was a girl named D. I was in 8th grade and I fell in love with her. All through high school, I loved her like I had never loved anyone before. She never knew it though, I was always too shy to talk to her.  So that was the big love of my life, "the one", the one that got away, etc etc. 

So what is love? How do you know when you're in love? The answer is always the same: "Oh you'll just know, you won't have to ask." "You'll know it through and through". 
That may be ver true for most people. But isn't it possible that certain people, that have certain unusual histories with love, might not have it quite so cut and dry? Spoiler alert: yes.

So why did I break up with K?
Let me assemble all the pieces that made it happen:
My brain recognized love as the feeling a teenager has to a girl that he has never spoken to. 
I had no idea what a 1 year long relationship was supposed to be like. I've never been in one. 
To me, all relationships seem like they are going to be short-lived, just by default.
And perhaps worst of all, I had a long time family friend, that I had that stupid teenage infatuation for. 

So my brain is telling me, "you don't love K, you love A. Forget common sense, that's useless."
And my brain is telling me, "how long can this relationship with K possibly last? It's past 6 months, it's gotta end sometime."

While I always treated K like the most important person in my life, I thought I had to 'wind things down'. And so for months, I was very standoffish, but only romantically. We had very little sex those last few months. I was just running out the clock, because my brain was telling me I was wrong. My brain was using bad data to make it's decision.

While I was still with K, and thinking about what I should do, I talked to my friend L. I said to L, that I think I should break up with K. And maybe try to start something with A. But even if I don't do that, if the relationship with K isn't right, then I should end it anyway. But then, I said something that, if my life were a movie, they would have played some seriously dramatic, ominous music.

I said to L, "What if I'm making  a huge mistake. What if what I feel for K is love. What if I just don't have the life experience to recognize that. And what if what I feel towards A is just stupid childhood infatuation, and can't tell the difference." If only I had said this to more people, not just L. But I didn't because A is a family friend, and I was keeping my feelings for her a complete secret. So I couldn't talk about breaking up with K, because it would not make any sense without me having to tell you about A. So I didn't get a lot of 3rd party input. This was one of my big mistakes. Because my worry above is, as you are reading in this post, SPOT on. And if enough people tried to talk some sense into me, maybe one of them might have succeeded. 

In other conversations about breaking up with K, that I had with L, I remember trying to think of reasons. Why do I want to break up with her. What does she do that bothers me. What is the down side of this relationship. Why do I really want to do this (without the value of hindsight). There were none. She was the perfect girlfriend for me and an absolutely amazing, smart, beautiful woman. Did I mention she's a PhD. There were no downsides. 

So based on this terrible information, and this terrible reasons, I came to the conclusion that I had to break up with K. But she seemed to be in love with me, though we had never shared those words with each other. I didn't want to blind side her. So that's when I started winding things down. What she referred to as "things fizzled between us". In trying to get her back, I tried so hard to explain that things didn't fizzle, I ruined them, because I didn't know what I was doing. So in trying to break up "gently", I ended up doing things in such a way that make it nearly impossible to undo them. 

So what is love? How do I know I'm in love now if I didn't before. Don't I just want what I can't have?
Being without K was exactly what I need to allow me to understand how I feel towards her. Being without her showed me that what I want most in life, is simply to be with her. I loved getting delicious sandwiches and eating them in her little kitchen. I loved snuggling up and watching ST:DS9 on her couch. Most of all I loved always having someone to talk to, someone to confide in. Someone who would confide in you. I knew I was a better person, and my life was a better life, when I was with her. But I didn't see just how big an effect this was, until it was gone. Love is not "oh my god that girl was so hot, i'm in love". Love is "here I got you a cute (stuffed) pet alligator because watching your face light up, lights up my soul" Love is a girl you look fondly at while thinking, I could be with this girl forever". That's a thought that never occurred to me during the time we dated. Now it's all I think of. K was exactly the person I've been looking for my whole life. I just wasn't able to recognize it until I killed it. I have no doubt that I am in love with her. Maybe my logical brain stops me from exercising my love in as many foolish, ridiculous ways as the average person might. But if there's one thing that's clear to me now. It's that I broke up with K because I didn't understand how I felt about her. Once I lost her, my feelings for her became crystal clear, that I am deeply in love with her.

K, being a scientist, would probably appreciate the scientific method here. Date a girl, really like her. Do you really, really like her? Un-date her and see how you feel, then re-date her. Now you've verified your results. This if course wasn't what I was doing, but it is a little ironic.

Lets talk about what a breakup is. In my breakup letter, I told her I still wanted to be her best friend, I still wanted to hang out all the time, I didn't want anything to change, except, essentially, our relationship status on facebook. When I think about what I actually wanted our breakup to be, and how incompatible that is with her dating someone else, it makes me think, did I really want to break up with her at all? Maybe the previous paragraph was my plan after all. Maybe I did just want to slow things down for a bit. 

See Part 2 for more on this topic...

2 comments:

  1. Well then, my goal in life should be to perpetuate the illusion for as long as possible. My grandparents were married for 60 something years. I can surely to better than one.

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