What the Most Hurtful Relationship of My Life Taught Me

I was 18 and so he. We met at a local metal show and I was there to see someone I was currently crushing on perform. His band went first in the show and he sat at the drums like a ship’s captain facing dark skies at the helm of his vessel. I was immediately caught off guard by how beautiful this person was. There was this shine in his eyes reminding me of kindness and warmth. In November’s cold, he illuminated the hollowed out parts of me caused by months of denying any feeling at all for another human. Essentially, upon meeting him, I knew things would be different for a while.

The dark, musty space filled to the brim with people thrashing around in a pit isn’t where I first spoke to him. There was too much energy coming from the raised platform at the front and I was too timid to wade through a sea of adrenaline and bones cracking as people crashed into one another. Rather, after everything quieted down and I went home, he requested my friendship virtually and we began talking like a pair of long lost friends.

On New Year’s Eve that year, we saw one another in person. He lived 30 minutes away. I drove to pick him up and we spent a few hours in a graveyard. We thought it was so unconventional even though reckless teens arranging meetings in a graveyard is an oft-used image used to add depth to characters, making them seem “different." We thought we were different. However, two people falling in love in a snowy graveyard is nothing like it is in the stories you read about love growing up. I was cold, and very out of my element. His hands found their way into my jacket and wrapped around my waist. It was then I realized it had been months since someone held me like something precious. There was a difference to it, more sincerity in the way it felt. Familiar, again, like his eyes. I was absolutely enthralled.

Over the course of one month, I had fallen completely in love for the first time in my life. There’s no explanation I can give about it, no justification for the short time it took. I stopped trying to figure out the logic behind the phenomenon, but suddenly I wasn’t the only person in the world who mattered anymore. This was the first time I thought about everything I did in someone else’s perspective, the first time I would have gone to extreme length to defend and protect someone. However, once I started showing just how much he meant to me, the relationship we had started to deteriorate.

At first, there were only molecular changes in his behavior. His phone was clutched to his side constantly. He would poke fun at me a little too much and it didn’t seem like he cared. When I was in my own town, my phone wouldn’t buzz as often with him saying little nothings like virtual sugar cubes.

Then it hit all at once. On the couch in his sister’s house, he uttered a few simple words to me in the dark, “I just feel lonely even when I’m with you.” But…with other people, he smiled. With other people, he would laugh. With other people, he would be himself. In one moment, my self-worth was reduced to nothing more than how he saw me and he saw me as book left on the shelf for too long, collecting dust. I felt the warm glow turn into fire in my chest. I panicked. I shook. I cried. It was like I was a tower crumbling under the pressure of the cement from which I was built and all I’d had holding me up were planks of wood nailed together haphazardly.

So in the morning I left, to be greeted when I got home by a flurry of phone calls and texts asking me to ignore the aftershock of heartbreak. It was a mistake. He changed his mind. Before I could wrap my mind around what was occurring, he was begging to see me, to come back. Like nothing else in the world mattered except his affection towards me, I agreed. His regret lasted a total of 24 hours and before I knew it, my phone was buzzing with doubts again. I was at work at the time, and in a panic I ran to the bathroom and threw up. It was too much for me. He completely owned me like I was some sort of sick toy. At the time, I didn’t care.

That night, I found myself lying in the middle of my grandmother’s backyard, having one of the most shattering mental breakdowns of my life. When someone makes you realize you’re in love and then consciously keeps you in a state of constant uncertainty, it is fundamentally wrong. I’m not the only person to have a breakdown over the having her feelings played with intentionally, this much I know.

For an entire year, I was uncertain. For an entire year, I was prevented from having any sort of relationship because he would act hurt if I showed interest in anyone but him. This didn’t stop him from being with other girls and expecting my approval of it, though. Only I was not allowed to find something better, healthier for me, or even the contentment of being alone. I was the pill bottle he used to make himself feel better when he was in between lovers, and for a year I allowed it. My best reason is somewhere deep down I thought this was my only chance at being in love. I thought maybe one day he would look at me and see someone worth keeping.

Then one day, we got back together. I thought this was the end, the one person I could spend my life with. People would ask us about how we met in our 80’s and we would tell them all about the small, local, metal show that winter in 2015. Our voices would be rough with age but maybe we would have the same sparkle in our eyes for just that moment, in nostalgia about the night we found that old cliché called love in a cloud of moshing bodies.

As soon as the thought of being an old bag of bones with another old bag of bones entered my mind, it died. It took maybe a week before I was back at my grandmother’s house crying myself to sleep because he “wasn’t ready for love.” I have never felt more incredibly stupid than I did then. When I woke the next morning for a job interview — yes, he did that the night before I had a job interview — I woke with a purpose.

My time being someone else’s cure for loneliness had come to an end. This is where the learning part of it began.

I learned being alone is a much better option than being used by someone. It’s a message overused but it is the truth. There is no right way to use a person in this world, and it’s extremely hard for some to feel out whether they are being used. But once I realized that’s all my year long experience with love was, I took back my self-worth. I started saying "no." I started caring about myself first, all the things he did the whole time. It made him mad, too. It frustrated him to see my growth, to see my love for myself and all the love I attracted because of it.

Eventually, I felt empowered. I realized what happened to me was a horrible thing for a person to do. All the times I felt shame about being unaccepted by him seemed ridiculous to me. I learned to cope with the time I wasted by spending more time taking care of myself like no man ever could. I’m sharing all of this because more people need to know love is not being needed by someone. That’s being a parent. You deserve more than spending all your time and money taking care of a person who refuses to give the same care back. The biggest love in your life should be yourself until you can find a person who cherishes you like you deserve to be cherished.

I’m not the only one who has let a selfish person gain power over her. This is for everyone who can relate, and everyone who needs the motivation to grow. No partner is worth throwing your happiness away over. You can find the love in yourself, and then you’ll know what you want from someone who wants you. Don’t keep letting people use you up. We’re all human. We all deserve the kind of love people make movies about.