Relationships lessons learned through experience

I had spent years being certain I was right, then discovered that being right had not made the distance feel better.

Contact that feels harmless to you can still read as something kept from your partner - the fact that nothing is "happening" doesn't mean nothing is being hidden.

Moving in together works better once you've already practiced resolving small disagreements - doing that for the first time while also sharing a lease raises the stakes on everything.

I don't know. Maybe that feeling ready is not something that arrives on its own. Maybe I was just scared and had a tidy explanation for it.

I thought merging into someone was closeness. It isn't really. You just get smaller. Rebuilding from nothing in your mid thirties is its own specific kind of embarrassing and hard.

all that time i was feeling everything and it was just. nowhere. it was nowhere she could find it. i kept thinking love was a thing that just existed between people automatically, that you didn't have to keep building it or whatever. i was wrong about that and it took her telling me she felt alone while i was right there. i'm not totally over that.

A committee doesn't feel what you feel when someone texts you at midnight just to say something small and stupid. They're not there for that part.

Time spent isn't the same as something worth keeping. I know that now. Wish I'd known it sooner but there it is.

I'm not sure I can say it neatly. Something about being alone not feeling like a problem that needed fixing.

I wasn't protecting anyone. I was just. I don't know. Running the same script my dad ran.

I don't think the tracking came from nowhere. I think I was anxious, probably always a bit anxious, about whether I was loved back properly, whether the whole thing was stable and real. And instead of sitting with that I converted it into a system. Systems have outputs. Systems are manageable. I know how to work a system. But what I had actually built was a prosecution case. Fifteen line items and a running total and I was building the case against someone who was just, as far as I can tell looking back, trying to be in a relationship with me. I still make spreadsheets. That is my job, I'm not going to stop doing my job. But there is a difference between tracking a budget and tracking a person and I knew that difference. I did know it. I just didn't apply it. Or I applied it too late, which is functionally the same thing. The two pence gap. I kept closing the two pence gap when it didn't matter and I missed the thing that did. I keep coming back to that. Not sure it leads anywhere useful. I just keep coming back to it.

I thought keeping things to myself was a form of kindness. I genuinely believed that. It wasn't kindness. It was just quieter. She was sitting next to me all those years with no idea there was anything to know, which is its own kind of loneliness for a person. For her I mean. I was lonely too but I'd made myself that way on purpose, or near enough as makes no difference.

I think I got lucky. But also maybe the luck was just picking someone I actually liked. Which sounds obvious but apparently it isn't, people treat it like a red flag.

I'm not sure jealousy is even the right word for what I had. Jealousy suggests there's something real to be jealous of. This was more like fear with nowhere to put itself. I kept handing it to her to carry and calling that intimacy. It wasn't. It was just weight. And the thing is I knew this somewhere, I think most people know this somewhere, but knowing it and actually stopping are quite different things. I had a book about attachment styles that I'd bought and not really read past chapter two, which is maybe a lesson in itself. Or maybe not. I don't want to oversell what I've learned here.

I think I was feeling anxiety and calling it love. The lurch in my chest with Marcus wasn't chemistry, it was just my body knowing something was uncertain. The calm ones I dismissed, I think I thought calm meant nothing was happening. I'm not sure that's true anymore. I'm not sure when I worked that out or if it's even fully worked out now.

The sunk cost thing is real and I don't think you fully understand it until you're sitting on a kitchen floor realising the time went anyway. I spent those extra years telling myself I was preserving something, protecting the investment, but there was no investment left, there was just inertia and a shared Netflix account and a dog I wasn't going to get to keep. I am not sure I have fully figured out what I actually learned from it. Something about how staying in something broken doesn't make the broken time retroactively okay. The years I put into the football before my knee went, they still mattered, the injury didn't cancel them. But I couldn't apply that logic to this. I kept treating the relationship like if I left it I would have proven the time was wasted rather than just accepting the time was what it was and it had ended. I did that for a long time. Longer than I should have.

I think I was measuring the relationship by its peaks. Like judging a restaurant by the one perfect meal you had there three years ago when it's been mediocre ever since. The ordinary days are the actual thing. The ordinary days are almost everything. I knew that already, from work, from watching other people. Somehow didn't apply it here.

I don't know if waiting was a mistake exactly. That's the honest answer. If we'd gone earlier, maybe we fix things, maybe we learn to talk before we've already half-given up. Or maybe we just drag it out another three years and end up in the same place but older and more tired. I genuinely don't know. I've gone back and forth on it. What I do think is that the leaflet sitting on the microwave for four months was about embarrassment more than anything else. Like admitting something was wrong meant we had failed at doing it ourselves. My mum's generation didn't go to therapy, you just got on with it, and I think that was in my head more than I realised. We didn't go until we were almost out of road and part of that was just. I don't know. Pride, maybe. Not wanting to say out loud that we needed help. The six sessions cost us about four hundred quid in total. Which, on a single parent income now, I notice. But I also think about the years before that when we were just standing in the same kitchen not saying things and I can't work out which cost more.

He knew. I still believe he knew. But I said it to myself so many times that week that it started to sound like a thing people say rather than a thing that's true. There's a difference between someone knowing a thing and you having actually told them. I understand that now and I wish I didn't because it's a useless thing to understand after.

I don't know if it saved us exactly. Hard to prove a negative. But the stuff that quietly destroys other couples, money especially, we'd already put it on the table before it had the chance to become a secret.

I think I believed that needing people was a weakness I was getting over. Like it was something you grew out of. I don't think that now. Or I think it more carefully. You can want space and also want someone to be in that space sometimes. Those aren't opposites, I just thought they were for a long time.

I don't know if I was even wrong in the original argument. Probably not entirely. Doesn't matter much now.