Reader, I Let Him Go

Yesterday, I finally did the thing I needed to do but didn’t want to: I let him go.

I’ve been seeing someone since April (I’ve blogged about him occasionally), but he was never fully into me. We had a deep, almost instant connection. I could not only see a future with him, but FEEL a future with him. We laughed, we had great conversations, we had similar values and goals. We had chemistry. That kind of magic chemistry that is hard to describe. We had all the things…only…he wasn’t ready.

We’d been honest with each other from the start. I told him that I was looking for a monogamous relationship that would one day become a partnership. I wanted to see someone once or twice a week with occasional trips/travel. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, but all of that sounded good to him. And as things started to progress, as that initial connection deepened, he said “I’m just not ready yet.”

I didn’t listen. 

Well, I listened, but I didn’t HEAR it. What I heard was: “Go slow with me. We will need to take our time. Be patient with me.”

It was that damned word “Yet”. I’m not ready YET in my mind meant I will be ready SOON. 

***

In struggling with the relationship, I started seeing a counselor. When you’ve grown up in a dysfunctional family, it’s really hard to build healthy relationships as you grow older (I’m finding) because you don’t really KNOW what healthy is. How do you recognize it? I have a mushroom manual for identifying mushrooms and it’s so fucking complicated, I wouldn’t trust that I could safely identify an edible mushroom from a kill-you-right-now mushroom. Healthy or poisonous relationships are just as complicated for me to identify and there is no manual.

In the conversation with my therapist, I told her the things I loved about him: how when he looked at me, I felt my whole body calm; how I could feel a future with him; how there was so much potential between us. And she said the thing that has stuck with me: “You can’t have a relationship with potential. You need to look at what IS.”

This idea really threw me. 

So I opened my eyes and, like looking at mushrooms in the woods, I tried to look at the aspects of the relationship and identify it for what it was. He wouldn’t make plans with me; everything was last minute. When I said “I miss you” in a text, he’d say “I appreciate that”. We took no pictures together. He didn’t introduce me to any of his friends. When we were together things were fun, but we were together so rarely that the fun after a while, seemed sort of sad. 

That was the IS of the relationship. I was in love with a man who didn’t really care about me, or cared about me enough to keep me around, but not really care for me or treat me kindly. 

That realization sucked. Still, I thought, maybe I’m reading too much into it. He cares about me. He’s just not ready YET. 

***

We broke up. I started seeing other people. He said his life was better with me in it and could we try again. So we tried. A week later, he told me, again, he wasn’t sure if he was ready yet. But by that point, I was so IN it, so besotted, that I didn’t register his words at all.

We had some good times. We had a few weeks where I felt listened to and cherished, and maybe even loved a bit. But then…

The final eye-opener this week happened this way: he was in a play and we’d made plans that I’d see it the final weekend on Saturday. He didn’t want me to see it opening night, because of the stress of that, he said, but I questioned if that was the real reason. And I had a thought that I didn’t know how he was going to greet me at the play. Would he kiss me, hug me? Would he shake my hand? Depending on who else was there, would he ignore me? 

This realization kicked me in the gut. It was a clear sign that something poisonous was happening here. 

I didn’t know if the man that I’d been seeing for six months would greet me as a girlfriend or a stranger.

And that not-knowing told me volumes.

***

I checked in with him yesterday. “Are you putting the brakes on us again? How will you greet me? What is happening here?”

He said he might be putting the brakes on, he wasn’t sure. He maybe really wasn’t ready. And maybe I could come on Friday instead of Saturday, because there was a cast party on Saturday, and wouldn’t Friday be better for me?

He didn’t invite me to the cast party.

I took some time with that. I registered it. I processed it.

I finally got it. 

He wasn’t ready yet. Not only wasn’t he ready YET, he wasn’t ready NOW. He wasn’t into me. He didn’t want what I wanted. He didn’t actually have the same goals as me. He didn’t feel a future with me. He didn’t want to take pictures with me or have me meet his friends. He didn’t want me to be his plus one. 

He didn’t want me.

It’s painful, this awareness. Of seeing it. And I feel humiliated, that I waited as long as I did, that I put so much effort into it, that I approached him with an open heart and spirit. 

Rejection hurts. Rejection makes you feel small and stupid and foolish.

But you know what would’ve made me feel smaller, and stupider, and foolish-er? 

If I had stayed.

Reader, I let him go. 

I think he doesn’t even realize how deeply he hurt me, but that’s okay. I know it.

And I learned some things from this.

I learned that there are things I can’t compromise with in a relationship. I want a committed relationship where we have great conversation and sex and we travel together. I want TIME with someone. I want an eventual partner. I want someone who looks at me and says “I’m so ready for this. I’m so ready for you.”

And the next man that says to me “I’m not ready yet,” or “I’m not sure what I want” or “I just want something casual”—I’m going to hear it. I’m going to know it. And I’ll know what to do. I will thank him for telling me, wish him well on his journey, and I will back the fuck away.

Because I am ready.

And I deserve love, and passion, and future plans. I deserve a healthy relationship that we both tend to and care for. I deserve an actual future, and not an imagined one. 

You deserve that too. 

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ABOUT TANYA EBY

Tanya is a passionate person who lives and experiences life deeply. She writes novels and tiny love poems. She loves to cook and go out to restaurants. She appreciates a good cocktail and a glass of wine (not at the same time). She narrates, produces audiobooks, and does quirky paint by numbers. She watches scary movies. She loves her kiddos, her friends, her two cat-like dogs.

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