A guest writer tells Capsule about the best piece of advice a therapist told her that helped finally end a toxic relationship with an ex.
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When I met my ex-boyfriend Hugh*, it was the first date of my dreams – the kind you sit through years of bad dates for, in order to feel that first spark of chemistry. We met up for dinner and I was so into him, I literally couldn’t sit still – my legs were jiggling with anticipation the whole time. When we kissed in the carpark, I was swooning so hard that I drove in circles – twice – on my way home.
This was IT, I was convinced. But, obviously it wasn’t, because the headline for this story isn’t: ‘how I met and married the love of my life.’ Nope, this was the fizzy start of an average relationship that would somehow haunt me for two years.
The first few months were some of the shiniest months of my life – off-the-charts chemistry, texting into the wee hours of the morning, hanging out in the weekends… finally, I had a proper boyfriend and everything was going to be fine forever!
Hmm. Not quite. Three months in, I felt the subtle wind change that happens when you realise the person who was SO INTO YOU is now emotionally treading water. I called him out on it, and he admitted that he was having second thoughts, because “I should be in love with you by now, and I’m not.”
In the better version of my life, I would have had a backbone and kicked him out of my house, but instead I painstakingly made him explain all the other times he had been in love, the timelines they had followed, and then why he should be in love with me. What a red flag parade I threw for myself! If you’re ever in the position of having to sell yourself as a dating prospect, please be smarter than I was and just get the f–k out of there!
This was a pattern we repeated for the next year – every three months, he would get cold feet, and I would basically bring up a verbal PowerPoint presentation about why I was a good catch. Like a quarterly performance review for a job you know you’re failing at, each time this happened I would die a little inside.
After a few repeats of this, my confidence was totally shot and I stopped remembering why I was a catch in the first place. Maybe this was as good as I could ever hope for? Maybe this is what adult relationships were like – you just settle for being okay more often than you’re not.
Finally, a friend recommended I see a therapist and over the next few months, I slowly started confessing how bad this whole experience was making me feel. It was after our second proper break-up that she said to me the piece of advice that changed my life:
“If you are not careful, you and Hugh are going to repeat this pattern for the next five, 10, 20 years of your life.” Hearing that was like a metaphorical glass of cold water being thrown in my face.
Here is why it worked:
One, it made me want to save my Future Self. My Present Self was totally okay with accepting an average-to-poor situation, because my Past Self had been single for so long, and I was afraid of starting again. But did I want Future Self to be stuck like this? No, I wanted more for her.
Two, it made me realise how lame our pattern was. It’s really easy when you’re in a dramatic relationship to romanticise your ‘will-they, won’t-they’ energy. It’s what all the good love songs are about! It’s the plot of every movie and/or TV show! ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ and all that bullshit!
But as one of my wisest friends once told me, ‘Some people mistake drama for chemistry’. We weren’t actually two star-crossed lovers, locked in a sexy battle for the ages. We were two co-dependent idiots who needed to pull the plug and move the hell on. And my therapist identifying that we could still be doing the same shit for the rest of my life was enough for me to gather the shreds of confidence I had left and aim for better things.
I was finally able to shut the door on that relationship and keep it shut, forever and always, amen. Sometimes in order to save our Present Selves, we need to think of our Future Selves, and what we want for them in order to move onwards and upwards, and never, ever look back.
