It Doesn’t Hurt Anymore

Tonight I talked on the phone for about an hour with a guy I dated several months back.  This is notable because it was our first real conversation since we broke up.

We had started off as co-workers, became fast friends, and after my engagement ended, we started dating.  We dated for a few months and then things began to fizzle out.  One day after I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days, I called him and asked him point blank whether something was going on.  Then he ‘fessed up:  He said that he didn’t know whether it was just his new job, or whether he didn’t care enough to make the relationship work, but he told me he needed some time to figure things out.  He couched it as a “break” but I took it for what it was: a break-up.  I told him I didn’t care to stick around and audition for the role of his girlfriend.

In the aftermath of the breakup, I experienced a rollercoaster of emotions.  I felt hurt, angry and betrayed.  I was hurt about the fact that he had a change of heart, but even more than that, I was upset that he wasn’t upfront with me about it, even though we had started off as such close friends–instead, he pulled away and made me initiate the breakup conversation.  (For what it’s worth, I should have seen this coming.  This was a guy who felt too guilty to “break up” with his personal trainer when he could no longer afford the sessions, so he just stopped returning the guy’s phone calls.)  At the time it felt like the world was ending.  I couldn’t envision my life without him in it, and yet I couldn’t envision ever being OK with just being friends, either.

So for the last several months, we had not talked on the phone at all, though we had chatted online once and exchanged voice messages.  When we chatted online, we had shared information about the people we were seeing (I only felt a little gratified when he described his new girlfriend as “crazy”) and to my surprise it felt actually fine. 

And then tonight we talked and it struck me: talking to him didn’t hurt at all.  Not a pang of regret.  Not a twinge of nostalgia.  Nada.   It was truly just like a reunion with an old friend.  We talked about work, our families, our friends, and did general catching up.  We each commented that it was nice to hear the other person’s voice.  We laughed about things that I never thought we’d laugh about.  And then we said goodnight and that we’d talk soon — and that was that.  The world stayed intact.

And it seems that’s just the way it goes.  When relationships end, when your heart hurts, it really does just take time.  Whenever something bad happens, I always wish that I could push past the hard part, but it’s just part of the process.  At the time it seems endless, but then time goes by and one day you look around and you realize that you’re OK.  And you realize that you’ve been OK, and you’ve been happy, for quite some time, but you were too busy being happy and living your life to recognize the change. 

As they say, “This too shall pass.”  And it’s such a relief to remember how true that is.