It’s been a week and all I can seem to do is wallow.
Q
My boyfriend (trans man) recently broke up with me very suddenly. We were together for two incredible years and it had been the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had. We had really great communication and talked regularly about what our life would be like together long term. Something changed for him about a month ago and he stopped talking to me about how he was really feeling. We had some logistical differences at the time but nothing we couldn’t have worked through by talking together. Him shutting down inevitably put distance between us. I felt it too but thought I was just going through some depression.
He let that distance build until there was so much pressure he had to burst and end things. At the breakup, he left the door open for us to try again in the future. I was shocked and surprised he’d be open to trying again, but I didn’t ask for details on what he’s thinking about because I didn’t want to overwhelm him.
We’ve officially been broken up for a week and a half and I am a mess. I can’t sleep or eat right, and I can’t get my mind to stay still and not think about him. We’ve been texting lightly and still (barely) maintaining our 787 day snap streak. I’ve been trying really hard to not bother him too much, but yesterday I felt so overwhelmed I just had to call him. I just told him that I missed him and that I’m so sorry for how everything went down. He pointed out that I’ve had a lot of time to process this but he really hasn’t been thinking about it. There’s obviously a big difference in how we process hard feelings: I feel them very deeply and he seems to compartmentalize and avoid as a form of self protection. I don’t necessarily think either method is the healthiest, but I can’t make sense of how he can go from being in love with me (and he told me he was still in love with me at the breakup) to not thinking about me at all.
The only thing that gives me any comfort is allowing myself to have some hope that we will try again, and that he just needs time. But I don’t know what to do with myself while I sit and patiently wait for him to process what happened. I know I’m supposed to focus on myself and do things for me, but all I can seem to do is wallow. I would love any advice on how to pass the time without crumbling and any advice on what he might be going through that’s making him put up such a shield around him!
A
Summer: Ouch, this hits me right in the memory box. I went through something similarly emotionally devastating on a much shorter timescale. With the benefit of hindsight, I think that him leaving the door open to try again is probably more harm than good for you. Being the person who initiates a breakup makes it easier to emotionally detach from the situation. What he might have perceived as an olive branch or possible consideration is going to live in your mind as the last hope you have for getting back together. That is going to obstruct your ability to feel whole for a while.
My advice? Treat this like a full breakup and do the associated things. It’s already emotionally devastating enough to you to justify doing all the things we do during a breakup. You’re allowed to do those things even if there’s an inkling that things might resume. But hanging onto that thread will leave you in a purgatory-esque place that is stagnant but filled with suffering. Take whatever time you can for yourself and recover. If things don’t work out, you’ll at least be a more whole person. If they do, then it’s better for you both if you’ve done recovery and growth work in the meantime.
Drew: I agree with Summer. It’s not going to be easy, but you should treat this like a full break-up. It will only be harder to stretch out the mourning of the relationship further.
And I don’t use that word lightly. Break ups ARE a loss. They are very hard. They don’t make sense. They can completely upend your life. But just because you are no longer together, does not mean what you had was any less special than it felt. Not all romance is meant to last forever. And, in my experience, any time I feel like something ended prematurely, I look back on it and can both appreciate it and realize that there actually was a good reason it came to an end.
It’s tough when a relationship is positive and ends. Sometimes it’s easier when a relationship is toxic, because there are more obvious signifiers to why it couldn’t last. But, ultimately, being in a healthy relationship is as much about you as an individual as the relationship itself. Take this experience as proof that you can be in a healthy, positive relationship and that, in time, you will find another.
Eva: Ditto what Summer and Drew said. Breakups are absolutely terrible. They never feel good no matter who did what, who said what and who broke up with who. It definitely sounds like you and your ex-beau were enmeshed in each other’s lives which is a beautiful thing to cherish. It’s also a tragic thing to fade away. Let yourself feel all the miserable and confusing emotions that surface. Don’t push them away but try not to get lost in them. Easier said than done but also worth the effort. When we see someone as our twin flame, the loss of that relationship feels like a loss of self.
My advice is to end that Snapchat streak. Go cold turkey and block him on Snapchat, remove him from your Finsta, take his name off your Close Friends List and put him on Do Not Disturb on your phone. If you were my close friend, I’d say block him absolutely everything, but my friends usually think I’m crazy for that. So this is the compromise. I advise going cold turkey (or maybe lukewarm in this case?) after a breakup because otherwise keeping up constant contact usually means you’re waiting for the flame to reignite. Let that shit burn out baby! Some hard boundaries and distance can feel drastic and dramatic–and they are–but that’s what detachment is. Staying in the grey zone with someone who wants to keep you hanging on makes it all too easy for them to abuse your kindness. It’s not even always malicious from the other person. Nine times out of ten, they are unaware of the severe emotional impact their actions have on you, but that doesn’t lessen the impact nor is it a reason to ignore the pain you feel.
You’re going to feel better on the other side. Those words are difficult to take in right now, but in a few months, you’ll be able to soak it up. Sending you love!
Where’s the line between gut instinct and relationship anxiety?
Q
I’ve seen a lot of questions/answers in this column validating that feeling when a relationship “just isn’t right,” and I wonder if you all have thoughts on distinguishing between that feeling and just having anxiety!
I have some baggage surrounding making poor relationship decisions when I was younger (and getting married, oops), so I think I may have gone all the way the other direction to second guess all my own choices. This idea of “it just isn’t right” has wormed its way into my psyche, and I’m not sure if it’s because my gut is trying to tell me something, or if it’s just playing into my regular anxieties (like the fear of waking up one day and wondering why on earth I’ve made a commitment to this person).
I’m in the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had, and I hate that this thought is taking up some of my brain space. What do you think people really mean when they say they ended a relationship because it just wasn’t right?
A
Em: The way I deeply, deeply relate to you on this!!! It’s almost like searching for signs from the universe that something is or isn’t meant to be. It feels especially prominent when I have friends getting married to committing to people and say “I just knew” or “I trusted my gut.” My hot take is that this is bullshit, and telling someone to trust their gut, especially when that person deals with mental illness, is horrible advice.
I’m currently going through the process of getting my counseling license, and I think about this situation in terms of other more serious diagnoses to gain some perspective. For example, if you told someone in a state of psychosis to trust their gut on something like harming someone else, their gut is grounded in a reality that is extremely true for them. It would be an authentic choice because that’s what their brain is genuinely wired to believe in that moment. Obviously we’re not dealing with that here, but I like to put this type of thing into perspective in that not everyone can trust things they just “know.”
I’m not giving you my professional opinion as a counselor, but from my personal experience this is what helps me gain clearer insight. Something I’ve found helpful is this thing I recently learned about called Relationship OCD. I’m not saying either of us have this or struggle with this, but reading other people’s struggles through this lens has been really affirming for me.
Summer: That ‘just isn’t right’ feeling and anxiety are inexplicably linked because they come from the same place. Anxiety is just an… overactive version of a completely normal and appropriate response. The difficulty of anxiety and many mental health issues is that they damage our ability to trust ourselves, leading to this exact situation.
I… actually think that your anxiety brain is overthinking the process of overthinking. Which is very common. I certainly do it. Your rational side knows that this is the healthiest relationship you’ve ever had and that’s great. Anxiety often manifests as our mind attacking a perfectly good thing with uncertainty.
When others say that they ended a relationship because it ‘wasn’t right’, the reasons could be anything. Sometimes that’s their way of saying they don’t want to talk about it. Sometimes they haven’t worked through the reasons yet. Some people do that because they’re impulsive. Others see a clear and irreconcilable difference despite otherwise liking a person. Some people say things ‘just aren’t right’ because their standards are high — possibly too high. Some people say it to mask an uncomfortable truth. Some people just find themselves in a new headspace and the dynamic shifts. Could be anything.
The question for you isn’t how would someone else behave and live in the situation, but how you should react to it. And if it’s the healthiest relationship you’ve ever been in already, that’s not a bad place.
Riese: I have made so many bad relationship decisions, so many times, I’ve been so very wrong about people so many times, and I had to eventually come to accept that I’m not really sure about my gut, and that listening to my anxiety is sketchy at best. Of course I’m paranoid all the time that I’m missing the signs I missed a million times before, that I’m thinking things are ok that aren’t ok, that this experience is a lot like that experience and so maybe this experience will lead to the same outcome that that experience did!!! But none of those thoughts made a difference, ultimately. Sometimes those anxieties or gut feelings were right and sometimes they were wrong and as much as I want to tell you that we one day will absolutely master our anxiety and our histories and never miss a sign or misinterpret our gut again, that would be a lie. We live and we learn but nobody is getting tenure here. Life will always be full of uncertainty, signs clocked, signs missed. All you can do is really ground yourself in the now, and see those anxious thoughts as ideas floating by you on a river. You have to sit calmly and watch them go by. You can consider them, but you don’t have to swallow them and they don’t have to guide you. Sometimes I can’t honestly believe I’m currently in my forever relationship after the 100 thousand anxieties I projected onto it. This time it turns out I was mostly wrong about the things I worked myself up about, and those other times I was mostly right. I couldn’t make a scientific case for why that is, or plot out the data. It just is. Love is love! You said from your brain and not your gut that this is your healthiest relationship ever, so I think trust that brain.
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I agree with the advice for LW 2 and I’ll also add this.
I’ve had moments of knowing that something is or isn’t right for me that turned out to be accurate. Not so much in relationships but in other things. And I also have anxiety and a history of abuse that messed with my sense of what “right” should look like. (And I’ve been wrong about people and relationships). For me, there’s a difference between how anxiety and my moments of intuitively knowing something in my gut feel – my moments of intuition don’t have an emotional charge and my anxieties do. My “this just is/isn’t right” or “I need to do this now” moments of clarity have been calm and not panicky. My anxieties are not like that at all! Also, my anxieties make themselves known every day, while the intuition stuff is less common for me.
I also think that it’s best to base any big decision, like staying or leaving a relationship, on lots of different types of evidence. Gut feelings and intuitions can be useful but they should line up with other observations. It’s worth unpacking the things that make you ~feel~ like this just isn’t right and the things that make you ~think~ this is the healthiest relationship you’ve had.