I have to admit that I never thought I’d be in a situation where I’d have to start from scratch again. After all, I had a nice apartment, an incredibly well-mannered dog (spaniel mix, for those who pay attention to these things) and the best girlfriend a guy could ask for. That is, until September of 2010, when she told me she was done.
“I just don’t think we’re right for each other,” she said; or something along those lines. To be honest, the whole “end of the road” period remains a blur, as the way I chose to deal with it at the time was simply not to deal with it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a mess for weeks after she broke the news, begging her to change her mind and resorting to alcohol to simply get through each night. Put plainly, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through the rest of the year.
The fact is, she was my first long-term girlfriend, and our relationship lasted for five years. We met in college, graduated together and moved to Maine an adult couple for the first time. We started our professional lives, adopted a dog together and talked about what life would be like down the road. I’ll never forget her dream of starting a farm together, and how her eyes would light up when she’d talk about it. I had all intentions to marry that girl. It’s funny how responsibilities can interfere with things, though, and that’s exactly what happened to us. As fairly recent college graduates, neither of us had high-paying jobs, and the bills would pile up in ways that seemed completely overwhelming at the time. This led to more fights than I’d care to remember, and a great deal of bitterness on both ends.
It’s important to note that, for all intents and purposes, we were a married couple. We spent 95% of our time outside of work with each other, neglecting to forge or continue friendships with anyone in the outside world. Our apartment became a sanctuary; a safe zone, if you will. As a result, we both lost friends and got to the point where neither of us were moving on in our lives; we became mere shadows of our former selves. I didn’t realize at the time just how destructive our lifestyle was for both of us. She was one of the most incredible writers that I’d ever met, and had all but stopped working on her craft. I had a history of focusing a great deal of attention on writing and recording music, and hadn’t picked up my guitar for close to a year towards the end. We were stuck in what now seems like a perpetual state of limbo.
And then it happened. She moved back down south where she was from, I moved in with family down the road. I’ll never forget how lonely things felt at first. My whole life had been turned on its side, and somehow I was supposed to figure out how to get back on track. I had neglected all of my friends during the course of our relationship, and was sure that none of them would ever want to talk to me again. I put a great deal of stock in spending my life with her, and couldn’t even think about spending time with another woman. I felt hopeless, really.
It wasn’t long after we split up that I met a group of musicians who were playing at a local coffee shop. I sat and listened for a while, and picked myself up enough to tell the mandolin player that I had a guitar sitting in the closet that might need some attention. After just a short period of time, I became part of the group and started playing music again with fervor. They’re now some of the best friends that I have, and we’ve done nothing but progress steadily to the point where we play gigs on a regular basis to an extremely supportive audience. To say this has been a boost to my confidence is a massive understatement.
With my new lease on life, I started getting out more throughout the week. Instead of sitting home and wallowing every night, I made it a point to get my pre-relationship social life back. I contacted old friends - the same old friends that I thought would never speak to me again. They were incredibly happy to hear from me. I started talking to women, and they talked back - a lot of them, actually. It didn’t take me long to realize that I had all of this in me the entire time; I just never had the confidence to realize it. It wasn’t long until I had a new girlfriend, and even though things didn’t work out between us, I had the confidence to move on within days; not months.
Looking back, I realize that the break-up which I thought would surely be the end of me was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me. Do I miss her? Of course, and I can’t help but feel as if I’ve lost one of the best friends that I’ve ever had. But as a friend of mine said when it happened, there’s no getting around the fact that everyone deals with a similar situation at some point in their lives. To say that the events of the past year have made me a much stronger person would be a massive understatement.
I’ve met a lot of people in the past twelve months that have been through break-ups just like the one that I experienced, and - like clockwork - each one has expressed the same things that I was feeling when I was in their shoes. I try to tell all of them the same story that I laid out above; an emotional rags to riches, if you will. While none of them can easily appreciate it at the moment, I have a feeling they will in a year from now.
"Erik Neilson is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Maine. Since 2007, Erik has published work on a variety of subjects, including health and wellness, sustainable industry and human interest. A passionate cook and homebrewer, Erik holds a Bachelors of Arts in sociology from the University of Vermont."
