This Week's Drama: Love & Lying

it's impossible to do one with out the other........ right?

I woke up one morning to multiple text messages. One from my boyfriend - sorry, ex-boyfriend - whom I had broken up with the night before. The message contained a few screenshots of me texting him “I love you” in recent months. He was asking if they were all lies.

The other text was from his mom: “Devin broke up with ____ last night. So sad. Especially around the holidays”. I assume she meant to send that to someone else. 

But back to the “I love you” texts. An interesting question was posed. I didn’t blindside this man, we’d been having serious issues, gone on a break, had several intense emotional discussions about our future, but I do think I fell out of love with him before breaking up with him. I stayed in the relationship while feeling deeply uncertain about it and during that time, despite constant doubt, I did say and text that I loved him.

To answer his question, did I lie? I feel more like I wasn’t ready to be honest with myself, and therefore with him. It was easier to say “we’re on a break” or “we’re working through it” at the time than to face reality. It was easier to say “I love you”. 

Now let me tell you about a time I was lied to. 

I went over to a different boyfriend’s apartment planning to offer him an ultimatum, you know, a classic “threaten to leave hoping he’d beg me to stay” kind of situation.… There’s a slim chance I still hadn’t learned much about being honest with myself and others. 

But it’s hard to be honest when you’re telling someone something they don’t want to hear, and I knew this would KILL him. He’d be inconsolable. He’d HAVE to be. I mean, this guy told me he was in love with me and wanted to marry me after a week. He said he’d never felt the way he felt about me for ANYONE else! Ever! Which is why it was so weird that he didn’t act like he was in love with me, or was attracted to me, or even cared about me a lot of the time. That’s what we had to figure out! That’s what he had to wake up and FIX once I said my piece, my beautifully thought out words that I…. 

Absolutely could not get out once I was facing him in his apartment. I just burst into tears and blubbered something out like “this has been hard and confusing and isn’t working”. He calmly said “I know”. And had the nerve to look relieved.

…………

He started talking about how unhappy he had been for a long time and how he didn’t know whether it was “just anxiety” or if he had “fallen out of love with me”. 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Panic and nausea and all of my childhood attachment wounds mixed together and hit me from the inside. I asked him to clarify - he wondered whether he’d fallen out of love with me? And he said “I mean, I do love you” with the tone of someone describing the way they’re obliged to feel about an embarrassing family member, like “I do love Uncle Victor, I just wish he didn’t have to bring his Ventriloquist dummy to every Thanksgiving, especially when we have guests''. I saw, through my tears, with overwhelming clarity, that there would be no begging.

He fell out of love with me, and didn’t tell me. He betrayed me. He LIED to me! I suddenly COMPLETELY understood the urge to screenshot every text he’d ever sent me saying “I love you” and ask IF THEY WERE ALL LIES TOO?! WERE THEY?!?! 

It would take months and three different types of therapy for me to understand that the answer to that question doesn’t really matter and that he, like me, was doing the best he could with the coping skills he had. The relationship needed to end and neither of us was quite capable of being honest with ourselves or each other about it. It was easier for him to say “I love you” and for me to offer an ultimatum, than it was for either of us to face reality. I don’t think it makes me superior that I wanted to force the relationship to last longer in some sort of sick, twisted way and I don’t think you sign a contract when you tell someone you love them that means if you ever break up with them it’s an automatic betrayal. 

I think the act of seeking love and intimacy and attachment is sooooo complicated and so big and forces us to face our deepest childhood wounds and to cope with our future and therefore, inherently with our own mortality and although it’s become my greatest passion in life to try to understand love, sometimes it’s so incomprehensible it feels easier just to categorize it. In the same way that it’s easier to say you love someone than to say “i’m having serious doubts about this connection”,  it’s easier to say  – “they gaslit me” / “he ghosted” / “I was love bombed” / “I’m anxious-attached” / “my love language is fucking and theirs is watching TV” / “it’s daddy issues” / mommy issues” / “he’s a manipulator” / “narcissist” / *Khloe Kardashian Voice*: “LIIIIIIAAAAAAR!!!!!!!!!” – than it is to look deeper at one’s own relationship patterns and why history has been repeating itself. 

And that’s my dissertation on why therapy is a better investment than ass implants, awaiting peer review.