Tag: breaking up

A Moving Day Brings Finality

It was a cool August morning as improbable as that sounds and when I awoke it had already been raining for hours. The pit-pat of drops falling through the leaves outside my balcony was like a refreshing of the mind. The grey skies and rain stood in stark relief against the normal summer heat.

Today was a day I had always been expecting, but not because of the weather; it was moving day. I was taking the last of my things out of an apartment that had been my home for three years.

This apartment that I was now leaving, I had moved into with my second wife. We moved from across the country for no other reason than because we could. It was a choice I always wanted to make but couldn’t on my own; together though we made it happen. That’s what our life together felt like for me, possibilities. It was an exciting time and that place for me was the launch pad for our new life together and a new me.

Our marriage was ill advised if for no other reason than the speed and frivolity with which we approached it. The marriage was itself a financial decision that made sense at the time and that we figured was just ticking off a box that would be achieved down the line anyway.

For me, our relationship was perfect. Not really perfect mind you, we had our ups and downs like most other relationships, but I truly wanted to be nowhere else. I had never experienced such emotional devotion to someone else as I did her and it was a beautiful thing. Our relationship was improbable but it was ours and I loved it.

I don’t know if all goods things must come to an end but I know that one day it did. With that moment my fairy tale was over. It had been a wonderful ride and an experience that has shaped my life in many positive ways.

I had been living here without her for two years. Still, looking out the windows for the last time this was truly the end. There was something about leaving the place that we were supposed to be happy in that gave the relationship a finality I didn’t know was missing.

As my roommate was moving stuff out I wanted to voice all of this to him but I couldn’t even form the sentence on my lips without wanting to cry. So I just left it there in my head.

As I walked around the apartment I said my final goodbyes to those memories. My life would never be the same as when I lived here. Somehow, there’s a beauty to that as well.

P.S. This article is not on this blog chronologically. It had been collecting dust for at least two years. I wrote the article on the day of my move standing in my apartment and for some reason I never published it. Now I have.

Dating Will Break You

I was going to write something about how I’m in love with dating. I’m sure I still will pen that article, but I wanted to take a very brief moment to share something else. Something almost the opposite of that. It’s not edited or poetic. It just is.

At times dating will break you. I had a date tonight that was pretty good, but at the end of it she said, “I’m not romantically attracted to you.” I was fine with this, thanked her for the honesty and said good night. Later at home it hit me like a ton of bricks.

I want to be with someone in a meaningful way and it seems like I’m so far away from this. I want to have someone to love and I want to be loved. It’s such a simple thing but yet so hard to achieve.

Tomorrow, I’ll dust myself off and jump back in with both feet. I’ll eventually find someone that will have made the struggle worth it.

For now though, I’m going to cry and that’s okay too.

Getting Dumped, Kind Of: A story of honesty

For those of you who don’t know I’m currently choosing to date non- monogamously. For some of you this probably sounds great because I can have multiple partners. This is technically true, but it hasn’t really worked out that way for more than a week or two at a time. This brings me to the other part of being non-monogamous, that you may not have considered, which is that I end up getting dumped more often.

This just happened to me ten minutes ago (at least at the time of this writing). Here’s the skinny: I met someone online and reading her profile was like reading my own in many ways so I reached out to her and we clicked. On our date it was awesome. We met with a long hug. We laughed and shared intimate moments of our existence with one another such as how she doesn’t share her phone number with people until she can trust them. When I moved closer to her just for the sake of it she closed the gap, kissed me and then told me how great it was. Later upon kissing her neck she moaned. The night was over in a flash, but we had talked for 6 hours. When I walked her to her car we held hands and kissed goodbye.

I sent her a message later that night with my phone number. I told her that she didn’t have to use it until she was ready and that we could use the dating app until that moment arrived. She replied with a text telling me that I had beat her to it.

I was in, or so I thought. The day before our next date she sent me a text to say that our distance was an issue (20 miles) and that a relationship she had with a guy in the same town as me hadn’t worked for that reason. I called bullshit (in my head) on both fronts and decided to remove that excuse. I knew she wanted out and that I wasn’t going to change her mind; so be it, but I wanted to know the truth. I told her if that was all there is to it I could be the one to come see her each time. Of course, such a one-sided solution is not a tenable situation for any relationship, but I was just gambling and cutting through her fake answer.

It worked. “To be honest,” she said, (for the second time) “I was trying to make it easier by saying that. I’m just not feeling it.”

I told her I accepted that and thanked her for being honest. Just knowing the real reason helped me to put most of the situation behind me immediately. I don’t know what to make of everything else that happened, but now that I have the truth, somehow I don’t have to.