April 25 wow what a really good talk we had and holy shit if we had these types of discussions we’d be an epic couple a couple that survives and thrives. 

April 23 Day 0 – from 8am and on all night, this was the worst day. The day i’ve feared before we even started officially dating. This is the reason I woke up from anxious dreams. The fear of losing you carried me. This is what I wanted the least, but thought about the most. 

April 24 Day 1 – I laid in bed with you. I watched a movie with you. Snuggled the dogs with you. Kissed you. Breathed you in. Squeezed you. I’m always loving you. We had a normal day but it wasn’t normal because we were done. I wasn’t laying in bed with my boyfriend. I was laying in bed with my ex. I was watching a movie with my ex. I was snuggling with my dog, my ex’s dog (still my dog in my heart) and my ex. I breathed in my ex. I squeezed my ex. 
We fixed the dish washer together. A house project, which was about the only thing of newness you and I could share and build. You hugged me when I cried. I cried a lot this day. Not as much as yesterday/ the morning. But a lot, still. We gave Brick a bath. It was a normal day. But it wasn’t. You left for volleyball and something inside me switched. I realized you dumped me.
You broke us apart. You called it quits. You made my absolutest biggest and worst fear come true. I started leaning in to your bad side. Your flaws. The things about you that aren’t great. I have them too. But instead of grieving over you, crying over you, I chose to dislike you. Laugh about how you threw me away. I told myself that he did this because he doesn’t want you and thats that. Don’t cry over a guy who doesn’t want you.

April 25 Day 2 – thank you, next day. I was over it. Done with it. I wanted you to move it along. I wanted you to suffer through figuring out the logistics of getting out of this house I now have to live alone in. It is such a big house. It’s such a big rent. I’m looking for furniture. A new couch (I thought id buy with you) and a kitchen table (I thought we’d get a new one together). You betrayed me. I wanted you gone and I want it to sting. I want it to be complicated for you. I want you to face exactly what happens when a couple splits up. The moving boxes. The packing of things. The diving of things. The finding a new place. The paying for rent because you’re legally responsible and you don’t just get to leave. I wanted you to really re consider our break up. But I also didn’t want to let myself take you back because you ended it and that was the fear. You made my biggest fear come true. But then I thought – what the fuck happened. How did this become our reality? Where did things go wrong? What were the unsaid words, the undone actions that didn’t let us survive the fights we had and why were our fights so cyclical and passionate? We started with a ton of passion. When did the passion for each other channel itself into a passion for being right? I asked you to talk. You did. I laid the ground rules, and we abided by them. For the first time ever we talked about our relationship as a whole. We talked about the journey of it. We talked about the shifts in our life and the way we communicated during it. I learned about your own anxiety about me/ us. And I got to further explain and help us both understand my anxiety about you/us. Both of our minds were liars – you never wanted to leave me. I never wanted to pressure you. We wanted to grow. The timing was wrong. We agreed on it all. 

We agreed that we are each others second love – the hard love – the love we wished worked out. We learned so many lessons. We learned so much about ourselves. We learned that if we had been able to pick up new experiences together and grow our passion into commitment, that our love would be unconditional. Our love never got the right chance to grow. We spent our first year together stuck inside, no outlets, no real independence from each other. We couldn’t grow as a couple because we couldn’t grow as individuals. We turned on each other because thats what happens when passionate love doesn’t get the room to flourish. Apply poor communication skills to that, and the defeat of your job loss, and the failure and post party depression from a miscarriage, how could we have ever survived? We couldn’t escape our own wrath – we couldn’t get away. We couldn’t go to fun places as a couple. Yes, we traveled but played different roles. We went to weddings but you had to play best man while I played guest. We went to Miami but you had to be physiologist and I had to be dietitian working very long days. We went to Florida but it was quick and family-oriented. We’ve done Christmas but again that’s quick and its family oriented. There was no room for any trips for us to just be as we were when we first started dating: adventurous, lustful, flirtatious, relaxed. Our timing was off. Our communication skills, subpar. 

If we could have met 1 year earlier we would have had April 2018-March 2020, nearly 2 years of growing together. Getting that passionate love to commitment love. If we moved in together 9  months later- may 2020 instead of august 2019- , we would have only spent 1/3 of ur relationship during a pandemic, and not even the worst of it, the better half of it. We wouldn’t have become so fatigued so early on in our relationship and so concentrated. We wouldn’t have become so intolerant of each other’s behaviors because our behaviors wouldn’t have felt so terrible. You wouldn’t have felt so much pressure from me, I wouldn’t have felt so much anxiety about you. 

We could have had the space we needed to grow as individuals and as a couple. That initial emotional chemistry that drew us in together like magnets would have be re-inforced with more adventures, more experiences, more heart felt conversations, more traveling, more desire to see each other. 

All couples fight – but fighting can be healthy, ours were not healthy because they didnt happen on as secure of a relationship foundation that we were forced to build ourselves on and in. 

We don’t work because we didn’t have the circumstances to work. But we tried, we kept going we kept dueling because we knew we loved each other so much. We love what we had together so much. We love talking about parts of our future together so much. But without the right roadmap or skills or breathing room our relationship suffocated. We suffocated. We yelled because we couldn’t actually hear  what each other was saying. 

You were never saying: I don’t want to be with you. You were saying I want to get this right. I want to feel stable. I want to feel secure. 

I was never saying: You aren’t good enough. I was saying you’re capable of everything. You’re more than what I ever imagined I could have. 

I love you. I deeply care about you. I celebrate your growth. I want to be a part of you, your successes, your failures, your lulls, your adventures. I want you to be a part of mine. 

April 26 Day 3 – I’m at peace knowing we agreed. I’m at peace knowing that it wasn’t actually us that didn’t work, it was us stuck in an environment we didn’t get to actually grow in. It’s why businesses failed. It’s why companies shut down. It’s why people faced financial hardship. It’s why couples that didn’t have the extremely solid foundation and tools didn’t make it. We made it through the worst of it, but never got to make the best of it. And now we have to rest. 

RIP Our relationship  April 2019 – April 2022