We Broke Up Three Years Ago
By: Natt Bartell
Tags: Relationships, Breakups, Heartbreak, Love, Inspiration

We Broke Up Three Years Ago

Photo from Unsplash.

We broke up over three years ago. I remember it to the day. November 12, 2017. It was a Sunday, and I was in Seattle — standing on the corner outside the apartment smoking a cigarette. He dumped me over text, or maybe with a short, curt call. I don’t quite remember that details now, just that my engagement ring was sitting inside the apartment in my green sparkly plastic retainer case, and that I didn’t cry. I knew what was coming, I had already taken it off. Moreover, I deserved to be dumped — or at very least we both just deserved not to be together anymore. It wasn’t working, and it hadn’t been for a long time. It turns out an engagement ring is not the band-aid we both thought it could be at 20 and 21 years old.

I remember telling my favourite professor once, in tears in his office, that I thought marriage would fix everything. Looking back, I’m embarrassed. Embarrassed that I was sitting curled up in a chair in this professor’s office, drinking the coffee he had just bought me and crying about a problem that was completely not related to anything he was teaching me in Senior Seminar on Horror and Medieval Literature: Sydney and Marlowe. But I had no one else to talk to. My family loved my fiancé so much that I felt unable to get objective advice, and at any rate, I couldn’t stand to hear an I told you so at that moment.

So there I was, crying to my perplexed professor, who probably thought I wanted to get deeper into the literature. And instead, I was telling him about how I was sure that becoming a husband would be a magical fix for everyone. That the relationship problems had been around in early winter, but when we got engaged in spring, I thought that everything was going to be okay. That certainly making it to the altar meant that we were different, that we could handle this.

My professor sighed so deeply as he leaned back, looking sad, and told me that an engagement can’t make someone into the person that I want them to be. That sometimes slapping that expensive bandage of commitment on things actually makes it worse. I couldn’t tell if he was speaking from his own experience or someone else’s, but it sounded like he knew. I had expected him to say something comforting, assure me that I was loved and that I just needed to hold it together long enough to get down the aisle. That I shouldn’t back out now. But that wasn’t what he told me at all. That was one of two times that same professor gave me personal advice, and it turns out that he was right every time.

So it’s been three years, and I’m wearing my ex-fiancé’s sweatshirt while I write this. That must seem like some desperate plea for the life I once lived, but I wouldn’t go back. It’s just a comfy sweatshirt, and I like to remember how much I loved the person who gave it to me. Those memories make me warm and fuzzy now because instead of being hurt by the bad stuff, I’m starting to realise that the good stuff is what’s worth holding on to.

One of my friends gave me the best breakup advice I’ve ever gotten when I asked her how I could just go on listening to songs that had been “our songs.” “Keep the good, remember the bad, and know that that music is still yours.” And I’ve stuck to that advice. Still, it’s hard to believe it’s been three years that we’ve been apart — though it hasn’t really been that long since we dated intermittently for two years after, and that all only ended a year ago. But I knew, even through our flurried situationship in September 2019, that it wouldn’t ever work out. And here’s the thing: I didn’t and don’t want it to, and I’m pretty sure he feels the same.

A part of me is petty and thinks that any day now he will come crawling back. I wonder if he thinks of me in the shower, or when he pours a cup of coffee, or when he lays in bed alone at night. Sometimes I do. But I don’t want him back.

Sometimes when I’m posting on social media, I think that this will be the post — this will really be the one that makes him realise that he let a good one slip away. He will look at the post and feel wistful, remembering that I am perfect and wonderful and everything good in the world, despite the fact that when I look at his posts I feel nothing aside from an errant pang of nostalgia — isn’t that somebody that I used to know?

The truth is, I think that a part of me will always feel this way simply because I have yet to come to terms with the rejection. Three years later, it still hurts to think that he chose to walk away, even if I pushed him there. Even though I let him. Despite the fact that I don’t want him back I can’t stand the fact that the feeling was, at least partially, mutual. Something about him really and deeply didn’t want me — otherwise, we wouldn’t have had the problems that we did.

If we were as madly in love as I thought we were, we wouldn’t have set up the roadblocks we did for each other. I wonder so often what it was about me that he couldn’t love completely . . . But I know that he could be asking himself the same question, and it hurts to think about either of us losing sleep at night thinking about something that — in the long run — doesn’t matter. Because what made us incompatible wasn’t some flaw that I had to change.

There was never going to be a plotline where I went through some huge character development journey in order to fix the Bad Thing About myself and get the guy. At least, not in any story that ended with me and him together again. The only thing I have really and truly changed in the past three years is the fact that back then, I was hiding from who I am and today I am trying to be as authentically me as I can be. So what it boils down to is this: he and I simply were not compatible, and that’s okay.

There shouldn’t be shame in admitting that for so many reasons, it just didn’t work. Especially when the fact that we are no longer together makes us open now to a more complete type of love — the ability to find someone that makes things a little easier, a little smoother . . . maybe a touch less dramatic.

One of the things I remember most fondly about our relationship is that he always brought me coffee when he was around (and he was usually around for finals week so it was much appreciated), but in ten years of friendship and two of dating and being engaged, he never knew my order. And he never asked. There was something so strange and magical about him coming in, holding a mystery coffee in his hand.

Sometimes it was a chai latte. Sometimes it was a soy latte. Sometimes it was even tea. I always appreciated it, but it was almost never what I would have ordered myself. In college, I found this whimsical, if a touch annoying. Most of the time it ruined whatever elaborate meal plan or dieting ritual I had going on at the time, but I drank it gratefully anyway.

I think the coffee is a perfect allegory for our relationship, which was in so many ways so caring and tender, but fairly young and misguided. He never once thought to ask me what it was I wanted from the coffee shop. And the thing is, I never once thought to gently tell him. We both continued to assume we knew what the other person needed, and neither of us ever checked in to see if it was right.

All the romance movies and novels and beautiful love stories we are saturated with from such an early age seem to tell us that when it’s true love, your lover will just automatically know — as if their brain is the Google search bar and every time you start a sentence their mind automatically populates the bar with the best fit. And some of the time it’s pretty close — but like the Google search bar on a real computer, the assumptions get old. Soon you start using the private browser just to stop it from happening. Before you know it, it’s like Google never knew you at all. And that’s okay.

Nowadays, on select mornings, my current partner brings me a ceramic mug full of thick black coffee. The mug says “Mr.” on it, and it’s probably twice the recommended size for a caffeine vesicle — just the way I like it. He asks me if I want cream, and most of the time I say no. But he always asks. I sit curled up with some needlepoint or fixated on my computer for work, and my partner pulls on one of my curls. It irritates me and I bat his hand away and start to snit about how he’s going to ruin the curl pattern. It’s life as usual here, and my dog thinks he wants a sip of coffee, and I am warm and I am happy.

In another hemisphere of the world entirely, I bet my ex is heading out the door to get coffee from his favourite shop. It’s definitely a dark roast, and he’s drinking it black too. Or if he didn’t go to the shop, he’s making it in his very own French press. Maybe if it’s a special occasion, he’s using a little bit of Peppermint Mocha creamer. It’s funny how all this time, he and I took our coffee the exact same way, and he never noticed or thought to ask me and I never told him. I guess we both had our fair share of little secrets, including how to best love each other.

It’s been three years since my engagement ended, and now I am finally learning not to take it personally. I am learning to hope that he is happy too because he really and truly deserves it. That if he moves on too, it will be a happy thing and not a bad reflection on me. That after countless cups of coffee apart, I have finally learned how to tell someone how I take mine, and that it’s okay if the coffee is actually an allegory for helping someone learn how to love me in a way that is authentic to me.

There are simply too many cups of coffee in the world to not find the perfect one for yourself, so find that cup of coffee. Search for it relentlessly and when you find it, never let it go.