I had this revelation 2 months ago. My boyfriend and I separated after a long and beautiful relationship and the event broke my heart. I’ve never felt such pain in my entire life and this is because I couldn’t find any palpable reason for the ending. We literally had the perfect relationship and the reason we decided to pause it had nothing to do with the connection itself, but rather with some unfinished traumas that have to be resolved privately. I’m not sure how this is going to eventually end, but at the moment we are separated and we are trying to figure out some things by ourselves.
Some context for my epiphany would be that my partner and I were, firstly, best friends. We were very good at communicating and this led to a very healthy way of handling everything that came up along the years. I’ve never felt the need to discuss about my relationship with other people because we were incredibly skilled at debating, arguing and even fighting. We learned how to be very good at keeping an open mind during arguments and we were always eager to hear each other out instead of winning the fight. Therefore, we managed to understand each other, to realize what our triggers are and how we can efficiently disagree so we don’t end up hurt.
Since I’ve never shared the intimate aspects of our relationship with anyone, it was incredibly hard for me to explain to my family and friends why we broke up. I was feeling like I was betraying him by telling the story. Since he was the second main character in this narrative, I was not comfortable at all to tell people his part too.
In the same time, the pain, the questions and the misunderstandings were excruciating for my brain. I couldn’t find closure or reasoning by myself, so eventually I started to talk. It was very difficult at the beginning. I remember that the first time I described the breakup to my sister, I felt like I had to find reasoning for his behavior. I used to say stuff like “He did that, but I understand that he acted like this because he was feeling…” Anything I would say about his actions required some sort of justification that I was just making up so that it somehow make sense for what happened. I know that some of the explanations I was offering when telling the story were real, because they were actually stuff that he told me. However, the other…
