Don’t give it up / here comes the life

Talking about a relationship that went wrong is a difficult thing to do; either with someone or in writing it means exposing things that are personal and close to heart but most of all it’s about admitting that something went wrong. I rightly didn’t write this at the time of the break-up as it was too close, too raw to get any kind of perspective on. Now a year and a half later and I thought by now I would be over it and seeking out something new and different. Unfortunately it was one of “those” relationships that defined my lifestyle at the time rather than being an ephemeral side-plot to existence.

Beneath all the flowery vocabulary, this is primarily a cathartic experiment, one where I readily admit I fucked up some things, but can now conclude wholly that I was not in the wrong, but slipped into it without me knowing. I have no grand overview of life, this isn’t something that has a moral or a neat outcome that can be surmised: “and he lived happily ever after”, it’s messy and blurred but not overly complex.

Let’s call my previous partner K (as in Kafka, Josef K.); I met her in the most inauspicious of circumstances, a Japanese themed karaoke night. Six-month story short, we forgot each other’s name, discovered them, went out, burgeoning relationship stuff. The beginnings are not important, the middle is where the meat is, and the end is simply that. The time of our meeting was shortly before I entered my last year of university and before she entered her second, this was a turbulent time as I’m in no doubt others in the same position can attest to. It’s a time when one is forced to really define how the next years of their life are going to pan out, I knuckled down to actually work for my final year, then spent time job-hunting and so forth in the aftermath of institutionalised education. The point to all this is that when you have a good relationship with someone at this point, the definition of life becomes augmented and one shapes things around their partner, in this case K.

It wasn’t something I was aware I was doing, it was as natural as it comes. The real problem comes in the dichotomy of this situation: on the one hand my life was changing drastically beyond recognition, and on the other I was still clinging to the university student ways by simple virtue of being attached to K. Whether this bred insecurity as to my abilities or simply detained me in a rosy reverie I’m not sure, but the outcome was that life was built around the other which made separation difficult. Not just the ultimate separation, but separation of leisure time, separation of self, “compartmentalising” would be the parlance. This did two things: it made me unappreciative of what I had and also blinded me to the crumbling state of the relationship, I was entirely too close to notice how fundamentally wrong things had become.

That is not to say that I didn’t notice problems, but more and more things were being left unsaid and as much as I tried to (re)connect with K, it was to no avail. At this point, K was more or less cheating on me in plain view. This is not to say she was going out every night and then coming back smelling like other men, but the communication she once had was now directed towards people on the internet. Eventually only one person. Hindsight is indeed 20-20 and from a vantage point, things become all too clear. That is not to say I was entirely blameless, while my attempts to communicate came to naught, I perhaps pushed K away through flippancy and treating her as a child though at the time, I believed (and still do) she was acting like one. Naively believing that one could change, I believed I could rekindle past glories by getting K to somehow grow up. This is the part where I’m supposed to say “but it was me who needed to grow up”, but no, it was her. Running away from a problem and emotionally investing yourself in someone other than your partner is still cheating; ignorance on my part does not absolve guilt.

This should have all come to a head when K mentioned she was intending on moving out sometime in the next year. A distant punctuation mark to a sordid, strangled-path of a relationship. If you asked me now I couldn’t say what I thought at the time, whether I quantified it as a good thing, whether I knew we would be breaking up, whether I thought this was a temporary separation for her to get her head straight I’m not sure, but once again, in hindsight, I should have been more angry. Passive-aggressive is never healthy but any passion at all may have changed things; instead just a blithe disinterest in things, I futilely continued my daily life, braindead to the situation.

The day K moved out was gradated, I remember an increase of space in the house and a decrease in noise but only the dim realisation that this was it. Dark times are all I wish to say about this period. But then I did the most stupid thing I have perhaps ever done, I talked to her. To call this a dumb fucking idea would be an understatement of magnificent proportions because it tied me down to what I’d lost. A pitiful war with myself to make sure I appeared stronger than what K had known. There is a reason that ex-partners shouldn’t talk to each other, perhaps because of vitriol or restraining orders, but mainly because it draws a very final and significant line beneath everything. Anything after that line is clean, black and white, rather than a grey smudge stretched across a year and a half; worthless beliefs that you’re over them because you’ve talked it out. Squared everything away and put right to the world. Anger and fury are necessary because making the other person hate you, no matter the side of the relationship you’re on, is healthier all round.

So I was not at fault for the relationship ending, of course partially for it disintegrating but I live without regret of anything I did or any of the time I spent with K; just because it ended does not mean the journey was worthless. What I do regret is the year and half I have spent dazed and confused, stumbling blindly about trying to find myself in every place apart from the most obvious. When a relationship you’ve built a life on, shaky foundations or not, comes to an end, the hardest part is finding out who one is without the other. I’m ashamed to admit it took an engagement message to spur this but I realise now that the desire to change is more beneficial than the change itself.

And apparently that’s someone who constructs rambling monologues on uninteresting subjects from the sublime darkness of early morning. Next time: ANGST-O-TRON, saviour of poor poetry.