Dissection

My ex-boyfriend recently laid out his latest thoughts in some texts to me.

“Another thing that’s been bothering me is that we were together a fairly long time and not one person has said we should work it out.  Everyone’s just like, ‘Well it didn’t work out—move on.’”

We had been broken up for months when the texts started arriving.

“I was committed to you, even when we were fighting,” he continued.

I felt my stomach twist with anxiety with the sound of each text alert.  I understood what these texts probably meant.  He was fixated on figuring out our failings and wanted me to help him dissect the problems that we couldn’t solve in our four years together.

I wasn’t just anxious—I was angry.  I was angry that I had to deal with this, even though we were no longer together.  I had bought a house and moved four months ago.  We had been broken up for two months leading up to the move, living at different ends of the same house, trying to avoid one another.  Not once during those six months had he made any efforts to talk, but now that I was really gone, he suddenly felt compelled to.

"I guess the biggest thing I'm struggling with is that I didn't want us to break up."

"I need somebody to care about me."

Even in my anger, I understood his compulsion.  Like him, I was lonely and scared that I would remain alone.  I too was bored and unhappy with what daily life dictated.  But I found myself frustrated with him for being the weaker of us, and reaching out.  He was looking towards me and our relationship as both the cause and the remedy to his suffering.

I wanted to call him out on it—not physically call him—but underline and deliver the truth about what he was doing.  He was refusing to look at himself and his patterns of movement as the reason for his dissatisfaction.  He was refusing to do anything differently but expecting a different outcome. In his previous life as an addict he had sought a lazy solution to satisfaction.  I wanted to draw a for him from this past self to this sober him, still expecting fulfillment to fall into his lap.

I know how this makes me look—like an egomaniac who has it all figured out.  Nevertheless, I wanted so badly to create this diagram to silence him.  I wanted to illustrate these things for him, but I didn’t.  I knew that any engagement on my part would only fuel this escapism into our past.

“I truly feel that we should have done better,” he wrote.

“I felt like I invested a lot of time with you and I didn’t feel like you gave a shit about me.  Is that true?”

“Was I just not that likable of a person?”

Most of the time he wasn’t—but I didn’t tell him that.

The next day his text read, “Do you want to go swimming with me down at the river?”

“I’m at work,” I said. “Maybe another time.”