Me and my boyfriend broke up after spending 5 years together, and knowing each other for 7. I am not well. It has been 6 days now, and I have just gotten to write about it now because I was booked to work from as soon as I landed back from visiting him to late last night. Working this week was a horror story. For the first time in my life (and for the first time as a symptom of a breakup) I am experiencing some disturbing physical symptoms. I have shortness of breath and chest pain. I keep taking long deep breaths but to no avail. My usual go-to coping mechanism is distraction, but it seems not to help this time. My mind gets distracted, my thoughts are with the present task, but the chest pain is still severe and at some points I get a strong burning sensation in my breast area.. I was so so tired all day every day these last few days, I just wanted to go home and disappear. And even though I had no trouble sleeping at night, getting up in the morning seemed just so repelling. Mornings are the worst, at first when I touch base with being conscious it’s birds chirping and sun shining, and in the next millisecond it hits me – the truth that I am in this s* situation. My chest starts burning and I wish I can just fall back to unconsciousness.
Update: 2 weeks later..
I am a freelancer (thank heavens) so I didn’t book in any work for the following week and I decided to go back home and get some dog therapy from my pooches, the only thing I could think of that would make any healing plausible. It didn’t help much, unfortunately. Writing about the situation did though. So that’s what I am doing here.
**I decided to (after nearly a year now) publish this, just to be a support to any other broken people out there who are, as I was here, desperately roaming the internet in search of anything that can help them get over a tough breakup.**
Therefore, a disclaimer: This is my therapy session, NOT A BLOG POST per se! It’s purpose is not necessarily to share useful tips and information (although I plan to post another blog where I go through some of the tricks that helped me get over this breakup) or entertain or ..or ..or.. Its sole purpose was in it’s making – the process itself is healing for me. Writing and writing and writing about it is the only (or rather, the best) thing that makes me feel less than totally miserable right now. So pardon my informal language and scattered remarks and my lack of desire to impress by ideas or content, all flaws and stuff on this one.
Here it goes..
It was not even a good relationship. That’s what’s bizarre about this whole thing. When we first met, I liked him because he had a nice sense of humor and some mature guy charm that was just so irresistible to the 25 year old me. But he was not a good man, and not a good fit, quite the opposite – an anti-fit. He lacked everything magical that makes a man have value for a girl like me – full of fairy dust and delusional optimism. In that sense, he was not even a person yet, he seemed as if he was born as an adult. But I suppose for that particular moment he reflected what I was going through in life. Namely, right about the same time we started seeing each other, my father got ill and soon after passed away, and my whole world of fantasy and cheerfulness went with it. It was a time of nothingness, and he fit right into that.. I see that now, but at the time I didn’t notice there was a theme there.
He was quite intellectually eloquent, I liked that. And the most informed person I have ever met in my entire life, I liked that even more. We could talk for hours. He was very good at explaining things as well and I am super curious and find knowledgeable people super hot. But then when it came to human contact and emotional interaction, things were blunt and horrible. The first time we slept together was by far the worst sex I ever had in my life. And it seemed to me that he is not withholding on purpose, it seemed that he genuinely doesn’t know how to do it, or even worse – that being gentle in bed is a thing. It was zero me and totally him. I remember once (much later on) he was telling me that a good “fu**er” is the one that screws a lot a women for his own satisfaction, not the one that “sucks up to women by aiming to satisfy her”. But I wasn’t really looking for a boyfriend since I lived abroad and had a bucket full of dreams to chase up solo, so I thought, great, this attitude of his will make me emotionally protected from attachment, yet distracted, which was exactly what I needed for a time being. I really just needed “something” not “the thing”. This will do just fine.
Playing with this situation seemed super safe because I would NEVER be with a guy with whom I have zero in common with. It was an emotionally bulletproof scenario. He is 12 years older and I always wanted to be someone’s “25 year old”, so why not flirt with the idea? And he wanted me very much. And that was very attractive.
He was a book example of a “must have control over everything” type of a guy. He was extremely snappy, anything and everything would throw him off balance and he would just snap, shout out that I wasn’t doing something right, and if I protested he would often get even more aggressive and start calling me names ( a total 3 year old tantrum of “you are stupid, you are a peasant, you are retarded”). Those bursts would last a mere few seconds a few times in a 24 hour day. But he would never do it in front of other people brutally like that.. In front of others he would soften it a bit and make fun of me in a borderline socially acceptable manner. I hated it. I felt like stuck between not revealing to his “friends” what kind of monster he actually was and keeping up with what I had of my dignity left since they didn’t know me well. He was feeding off of it. I noticed that his behavior with his friends was also very interesting (I am a psychologist by degree so I can say this XD). Since he is not your typical nice guy and his selfishness was preventing him from getting strokes via exchange for giving them, the only way he could get them was to have people laughing AT him. So he would tweak his anti-social behavior in a way to cross into being funny territory so that he would come across as that “funny weird guy”. What a grotesque behavior..
During nights was a completely different story though. During nights I was hugged as a teddy bear, squeezed and snuggled and never let go.. and at first I was confused but later I thought ok, that is the stuff that matters, right? Trusting someone next to you while going unconsciousness and wanting them so close, I considered that to represent the truth about his feelings for me and it felt good to have that honor. So I stayed. I stayed because of the nights and the squeeze. Stupid me. It was a trap. Nights never failed. Even during the day, between those tantrums, he was utterly and completely dedicated to us. And he always wanted me more, again and again, year after year. He was always there waiting for me at the airport, every next meeting was already scheduled, sometimes half a year down the calendar, he would spend days after days cooking for me, taking initiative for fun date nights, we traveled quite a bit too. But then I would do something wrong, and he would explode, and then I would get upset, and then he would get upset that I got upset and so on and so forth until it ended up that we waged a freaking war over the fact that I haven’t shaken the toothbrush enough before putting it back into the cup. So in a way, it was like leading this double relationship where we were being totally emotionally dependent on our worst enemy. We had a very well organized, super fun charged relationship parallel to bursting out into utter war 78 times a day. I swear, now looking back to it all, he is bloody Jareth from the Labyrinth!
How do we get tangled into these bizarre situations?? I have a perfectly functioning brain!
Potential explanation? Flashback to my first ever relationship:
My first boyfriend told me “I love you but you are crazy” as he was leaving me forever. That sentence resonated with me through the future years.. And I suppose I found a partner that I deemed to be even crazier than me, one that can then handle my crazy (and reinforce that statement). 
I know I can be difficult sometimes, and in our early days I would notice that he would either stop me or completely ignore these glitches. Wow, I thought, I am safe here, I can be free of monitoring non-stop what I say and how I say it and just be myself, freely. It sounded like just what I need. So we will be just like one of those ” because of my mental disability I out up with your mental disability” cases. We often laughed about how “crazy” we both are. A play of broken people. Joke is on us now.
That is one side of the whole analysis as seen by me. There is the other one too. O.O (you don’t have to keep reading.. just a reminder).
Namely, I have an in-born tendency to create this “emotional safety zone” around people when I spend time with them, my game is to set up an emotional playground and start running around it. One has never refused to join me. I find it incredibly effortless to feel carefree and it turned out it is sort of contagious. I am also very sensitive to someone needing love and support. I can’t help paying attention to it when I notice it and the urge to help is just out of my power zone, I do it automatically. And this man… this man screamed of the need to be loved. And like a child to a candy cone there I was, flying to the rescue. Idiot. From the outside he seemed totally sorted. Career, home, hobbies, friends, steady, responsible, organized, successful, serious, a proper (perfect even) human. But those people are usually the fishiest, aren’t they? Society made, afraid to be tweaked by own personality. And I was first squinting at that with suspicion and once I noticed the horror underneath, I ran toward it like a lunatic.
And here I am now. Sad, exhausted, angry and pathetic.
Let me tell you just one of the anecdotes from our last day together. We are in Berlin, I flew there to visit him on his business trip. We are walking down the street towards the metro, and as we are getting closer we see a train coming in. “Do you wanna hurry so we can catch this one?” he asks. “Yes, let’s go.” I say. So we start running and when we enter the station we pass through a hallway and run up the stairs. As we were getting up the stairs I take out my ticket that I have to validate on a machine that was, up until that point, always on the actual platform. However, as we arrive to the platform, there are no ticket validation points.. so I start panicking realizing I can not enter the train because I don’t have a validated ticket. By that time he is already on the train as he has a monthly pass and no need to validate. So I am now caught in this situation where I have to choose to either stay alone on the station or enter the train without a valid ticket. As he doesn’t have roaming on his phone, and I know his temper, I enter the train. And as I tell him that I didn’t validate the ticket..he just… explodes.. “You f*ing moron, the ticket machines were in the hallway, we passed them by!!!” – “Why did’t you tell me as we were passing them by??” – “It’s not my f*ing problem to worry about your f*ing ticket, you idiot, you have no brains, I can’t believe what an imbecile you are!!” he is shouting at me in front of a train full of people.. This was THE moment for me.. it was the n-th time that day he snapped at me, after telling me stuff like that I am too cheerful when I say hello entering coffee shops and that I am a retard because I make coffee in a coffee press at home “like no normal people do”.. that was the moment where, after 5 years I finally felt defeated. Up to this point I was always ready to take on the fight, to either argue, argument, chill and re-try, nicely, appealing to reason. But this time I just felt that’s it. I can’t do it anymore.. you win. And that night he told me he wants us to end. I am looking back now at this situation from a year later and I am shocked probably as much as you are now reading this..
How I felt? Something like..
How dare you want to break my shine, how dare you want to kill in me my love for life. I wanted to give you some of my light, to share with you how great it is to be excited to be alive, and you wanted to kill that in me, turn me into a dull corpse. I hate you for it. I know it’s wrong but I will repeat it.. I hate you for it. Go to hell, and me too, for being into my fantasies and fictional happy endings so much that I actually believed you have the capacity to become an actual person with actual friends and human contact and get a destiny you deserve if only someone just showed you they believe in you. But you are officially a lost cause.. not by birth, but by choice, and THAT is what makes you a loser.
Ok, now that I got that out of the way..
The getting over phase:
Heart clings to stupid things. I have been here before so I know the tricks and sneaky moves of a broken heart. Hope is the worst. Hope is what prologues the suffering. Even if your reason is telling you that this is a good thing and that life holds more for you beyond this milestone, your heart somehow digs hope up from the back of your mind and sneakily clings to it.. you only notice all of a sudden these weird comfort feelings swelling up from within and when you inspect it, you see that you have run that movie in your mind where he calls you, or you ran into him in the world where he regrets his decision and you find yourself in his arms again. Its a killer getting rid of that comfort, of that imagination, because you are essentially getting rid of the only thing that feels good. It is cruel, and your heart will hate you for it.
I was convinced for a long time that what I felt for him was not love.. more like liking and comfort that through time created a habit, and what I have now is actually only a withdrawal crisis. It’s incredible how we can miss someone who we don’t love. Is the need for belonging (for someone to need us, to miss us) so reckless..? Such a scoundrel brain..
I think about it sometimes.. how dangerous it is to be loved by bad men.
After retrospective analysis I have realized that this is a real trap. We seek validation and if we don’t get it by good people, we will, often unaware, gravitate towards whoever offers it, and ignore the alarms. It’s like candy from strangers, you begin to realize (or even worse, not) that in order to get validation you seek you have to pay with putting up with abuse. But how did I get into this.. That’s a really hard thing for me to admit, but I am just throwing this out there in an attempt to empty the space under the carpet that may have been tripping me. I had an ok upbringing, loving parents, solid education, I am seemingly stable, successful by some so-called society standards. Maybe my strength was actually my weakness. My desire for more reliability, stability and discipline and better intellectual stimulation gave me a man that was a rarity in being able to provide me that, and not such a rarity in coming with a predator behavior towards a woman.
“Sometimes when you win, you lose.
And sometimes when you lose, you win. :)” – What dreams may come
Update: it’s a year later now.. It took me a good 4 months to get rid of the heartache. After the breakup we went on a trip together that we had already paid for, and after he still wrote to me a few times seemingly about practicalities but I think he was just lonely. I went to therapy and after I did as my therapist recommended and cut all contact with him I finally felt liberated and getting over was so much easier. 4 months is a pretty good time to get over a 5 year thing, I’d say.. but I really put a lot of effort into it. Like, I went full on, youtube videos, therapy, new projects, got my life coaching qualification sorted (woho) .. I shall conjure up a bullet point blog on what I found most effective when wanting to get over someone..at some point. 😀 Until then, stay strong ladies. “If we are all alone, we are together in that too!!” – P.S. I love you
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Love, G.
oolloum 