Facebook, what a wonderful invention. Not just for catfishing but for finding out about your ex-boyfriends lives!
On Sunday I came across a status update of a friend of my ex (my ex and I no longer being facebook buddies) congratulating him on his engagement.
I should explain this is not the ex who left me heartbroken and who was kind of the reason for this blog. This is the boyfriend before him with whom I lived with for four years. He was 20 I was 21 and we played house rather well at first.
The relationship was ended by me because I was finding it too difficult and stressful, we argued a lot. We were living at my mother’s at the time and as mummy single pointed out years later, she hadn’t realised how spiteful he could be.
I played my part too. I was miserable, I had dreamt up what living together would be like and I grew frustrated when it wasn’t. I don’t lose my temper easily but when I did I blew my top, and then the blowing of the top became a regular thing.
So in the end I told him I thought we would be better off apart, I couldn’t actually see a future for us at that point.
Obviously now, older and hopefully wiser, I realise that we were simply too young to know what we wanted in life, and love and that living with a man is not all it is cracked up to be. I moved swiftly on to my next boyfriend (the heartbreaker) which I know hurt my ex.
He started dating too, and although none of those lasted he met someone who he has now been with for a number of years. I only know this because of the snippets of news I hear from mutual friends.
I was jealous at first, of the women he was dating, not because I wanted to be back with him but because he was in the first flushes with these women and doing things that in four years, he never did for me.
I’m not sure whether he was rubbing my nose in it or not but after we broke up we had to go to the bank to close our bank account. He was telling me about the girl who he had been seeing who he thought was just using him. He took her to the theatre he said, one of those deals with a dinner and a hotel room, but she didn’t seem to appreciate it.
Standing right in front of him was a girl who, for years, would have been happy for him simply to bring home an unexpected bunch of flowers or plan a day out, but he never did. He stopped dating me and started simply existing with me instead. No matter what I did he didn’t take the hint that a little romance might be required.
So now he is to be wed and I am happy for him, don’t get me wrong this is not some bitter account why it should have been me! But it does feel, well, a little weird.
Here I am embracing my singledom and seeking new and exciting opportunities, whether dating related or not and my ex is getting married.
Possibly because I remember him as the young man I was dating, I often forget the fact that he is now 27, but it is weird to think that this person who shared my home, my life, my bed, is now getting married to someone.
We had talked of marriage ourselves, in a rather dreamy way. One day when opening the post box at our house a huge cream envelope fell out and I opened it, thinking it would be junk mail. It was a wedding brochure of a venue in Essex.
I waited for my ex to get home and asked him if there was anything he had forgotten to ask me?! His explanation for the wedding brochure, before thinking about getting down on one knee, was that he had wanted to know how much weddings cost. He was always very gently teased by my family for his tightness with money, and we never had much to be fair, but I did find it odd that the costs were the first thing on his mind.
Of course I, at the tender age of 24 and being a romantic dreamer, immediately started looking into the costs of other things, how could we do a wedding on a tight budget, how cheaply could a dress be bought, yes I confess I even tried a couple on.
Yet no engagement was forthcoming and for the next two years I remained un asked. The initial flutter of excitement died down and I began to forget about the brochure. It was ridiculous really, we didn’t have a house or the deposit to get a mortgage and whilst we were not at each other’s throats all the time, we were not what I would now, in hindsight, call a happy couple.
When I broke it off I saw him a couple of weeks later, us both having lost about a stone in weight, both looking terrible, he wanting answers, and he asked me outright “would it have been different if I had proposed?”
I felt like a complete bitch and pulled in two directions as to how to answer that, when we had been together there was no question in my mind that we would be together forever and be married at some point, over the years I had swallowed any doubts I had over our relationship, never confessing them to anyone, and I had naively thought that this was what being in a relationship was about, sacrifice.
And it is to an extent, but not your happiness, never your happiness.
“Yes” I said in response to his question “It would have been different, it would have made breaking up so much worse”
I was trying to be honest with him but I don’t think anything I could have said would have made him feel better at the time.
When I found out he had seen a Dr for the anxiety he was suffering with in the months after our breakup I was devastated, I wanted to call him and tell him to come back and we would work it out, but I didn’t because it wasn’t the right thing for either of us but my heart broke for him.
Over the years I had lost sight of the fact that I meant anything to him, I didn’t feel like I did mean anything, I felt like a pet he kept, a pet who made dinners and washed shirts but clearly he had be blind sighted by my decision to end our relationship.
So now he is getting married to someone who, from what I have heard through friends, is rather lovely and I am happy for him. He deserves a good life with someone who loves him. Not that I didn’t but I just didn’t love him in the right way to make a happy long term relationship work.
Where does this leave me? It has only strengthen my resolve that I will date, but not be in a relationship until it is 100% right. I don’t mean never having an argument or disagreeing, but the foundations have to be strong, that’s what I am looking for.
Having said that it has made me think about the future, I don’t know if I am unique in that I tend to have a tendency to not envisage a future for myself, all by myself (Bridget Jones) Rather I find myself envisaging a life with someone, with a couple of kids, a family and a house of my own.
The problem with this is that in doing so I am not envisaging what could well happen, that I don’t meet someone, I buy my own place - alone, I travel; I don’t have kids anytime soon. In focusing on the former am I simply coasting through life until these things, the man, the house, the superhuman sperm that will fertilise me instantly, fall into my lap? (not literally in the case of the sperm because sperm in the lap is no use to anyone)
I’ve been feeling for a long time that I have not been doing all I could with my life and this may just well have proven it. I might not be getting married but what other exciting things could I be doing, if I had the guts?
Until next time
Love
SG
X
