That was the only thing in my mind as I arrived at her house and stepped out of the car: she looked the same to me, but at the same time, there was a strange uneasiness between us. I thought it might have been the distance—like I said, we had been apart for a while, but we had been talking. We talked every day, in fact; I loved her, and I told her regularly. When we were apart, I missed her more than I thought I could ever miss anyone. When I saw her standing there waiting for me, I was relieved: I thought that finally we were back together, and the fights that we had been having over the phone and via text message could finally come to an end and we could just enjoy each other’s company again. I was so wrong, but it wasn’t for another few hours that I would realize how wrong that I really was.
She tried to act normally for a few hours, but I saw her façade start to crack early in the afternoon. We were sitting at the frozen yogurt place—she loved to eat there—and she was uncharacteristically quiet. I asked her what was wrong, but she didn’t answer. All she seemed able to do was to play with her spoon, picking at the gummy bears that were drowning in her strawberry-and-coconut mixed frozen yogurt. I haven’t been able to eat frozen yogurt since, because the memory of her face as she spoke the next words is so strong.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.” Those were the words that she spoke, I think; or maybe I made them up and she said something different; all I know is that I didn’t understand at first. I asked her to clarify, and that’s when she told me she didn’t want to be with me anymore.
I consider myself a logical person, but I’ve never felt anything like this before: I tried to plead with her, to convince her that we could make it work. She cried, and she seemed genuinely upset, but she was not going to change her mind, she said. We could stay friends—but she didn’t want to be with me anymore, and she didn’t see any way for me to change her mind. The strangest part of the whole experience was the disconnect I felt between reality and what was happening inside my head. I could see that I would hurt a lot later, but my body and brain did not seem able to comprehend the situation. I just felt cold and tingly all over.
You’ll be okay eventually, my brain was telling me as I got my things and prepared to leave. This will all pass, and you’ll be okay. At the same time, I thought that maybe I had messed up the only chance I would ever have at a successful relationship; I was scared of what the future would hold, and I was scared that I would be alone forever. As I travelled home, I began to feel some of the emotions that had not been present before—the pain was starting to creep in and overtake the numbness. By the time I got home, I was more upset than I had been when she had broken up with me.
It was like I was going through all the stages of grief at once. I was swinging between anger and bargaining and denial and depression with alarming speed. My parents asked me what was wrong, and I broke down and told them; they consoled me, but I knew that nothing anyone said would make me feel better in that moment. At the same time, the small voice in the back of my head kept reminding me that the pain would pass and that I would eventually be happy again.
Being happy again was a slow process, and I made a lot of mistakes on the way. This event changed the way I looked at relationships—not in a misanthropic way, to be sure, but in the sense that I realized that most relationships between young people are transitory and ephemeral. I learned that the grieving process is a process, and that it is not always the straightforward five-step process that is sometimes presented.
But most of all, I learned that in a break-up situation, social media is everyone’s worst nightmare. Social media brings out the worst in people; hiding behind a screen can cause everyone to act like an idiot. I made the pain of the breakup worse by talking about it on social media, and I think that in the future, I will be more careful to keep my social media use to a minimum when I am feeling particularly emotionally raw or distraught. Everyone told me that the first breakup you experience is the worst—that first love is the worst when it ends. I don’t know if I believe that, but I know that I learned a lot from the experience and I am grateful to have had it, even if I never want to experience it again.
