Dating : Time Will Change Your Failed Relationship

In the mirror, all I see is time.

How time has etched around my eyes. How a million laughs and a million tears have forged their own paths along brows and cheeks. How day-old stubble now includes the occasional silver.

I don’t mind the stubble. I wish I didn’t mind the lines. The reflection of time. Time has changed many things. Not just the color of hair or the tightness of skin around eyes. It’s changed the way I think. The way I see into the past.

The way I look into the rearview mirror of life. The way I think of past events and people. At relationships.

There was once an evening I went to bed, blaming a failed relationship on a former spouse. There was once a morning I woke up and understood that not to be the case.

There was no blame. Or failure. Just the past. A past that now looked back at me. Just as it looks back at you.

Following my divorce, I pushed all the blame onto my ex-wife. She didn’t argue or complain. I didn’t help. Things were difficult for her. Doing her best to tread the water she’d jumped into, I offered a cement block instead of a flotation device.

I’m sure I could have helped. I could have shouldered some of the blame. Some of the responsibility. But that meant jumping in the water with her. I hadn’t yet dried off from swimming in a sea of my tears. I had no intentions of jumping back in.

For a time we remained what I guess you’d refer to as friends. More than cordial. Less than a relationship. And yet I never asked how she was doing. At the time maybe I didn’t care. Maybe I struggled to see past my own emotions and didn’t think to try and find hers. Or going through life at the time with my eyes closed meant I didn’t have to deal with it.

When someone wrongs you. When they hurt you. Do you care how they feel? Or does your own pain course through every cell? Does every breath push this emotional collapse throughout the rest of your body, as if blood cells have replaced oxygen with depression? If you did ask and they told you how they felt, would you even care? Would you be capable of compassion? There’s only so much you’re able to absorb, and if your body has reached the brim taking in your own hurt, the emotional pain of another would simply pass by.

It’s possible I wouldn’t have been emotionally stable enough to ask my ex-wife how she felt. What she was going through. Looking back into the mirror of time, it might be best I didn’t.

It took me years to fully understand my own feelings. To peel back what I went through. What I felt. How it impacted me. How it changed me. Our divorce absolutely broke me. I wouldn’t have said that back then. I’d bite my lip, smile, act like nothing bothered me in person, then I’d cry, wrap arms around knees as I hugged my legs at home, trying desperately to sleep. To forget. To speed up the passing of time.

But I needed time to move slowly. To uncover how I felt. To uncover why I felt. You can’t speed up time no matter how bad you want it to. You need to feel everything. The pain. The twisting. The emptiness. They’re terrible feelings. But without that time you don’t learn how to heal. How to recover. How to prevent it from happening again. You don’t give yourself the opportunity to learn, or to look back with a different perspective.

Had I asked her how she felt then, I probably wouldn’t have taken it well. In reality, I would have made it about me. How dare she feel how she felt? That’s how I would have taken it. At least that’s how I’m guessing I would have.

Now, after all these years, even if I had acted in a different way, it wouldn’t have changed anything. Yet I’m able to look at her, from my current reflection, and see her as not just a person. But a good person. She just happened to be a good person who hurt me.

She broke my heart, and yet with the same hammer she used to smash it like glass she’ll use it to mend and build the heart of another.

And I hope it lasts.

I’m not sure when the shift came. When I woke up wanting her to be happy. Because I wasn’t always there.

You might not be either. Maybe you won’t be. Maybe it’s not possible. Every relationship is different, and yet most relationships, at some point, come to an end. That’s the one thing we have in common.

I won’t tell you how to look into your own past. Because your past is your own, and your journey is your own. The one thing I will say is, in a way, it’s a relief to no longer hold that grudge. I never hated her. At least I never let myself say that out loud. I never let my heart admit it or my brain accept it. But for a time I didn’t want her to find happiness. I wanted someone to do to her what she did to me.

Why?

I have no good answer. There is no good answer. Relationship capital punishment.

Good people will sometimes hurt one another. But when they do, chances are they were already hurting.

I may never know how her story unfolds from here on out. I may never talk to her or see her again. That’s okay. I’m comfortable with that. After years of glancing into the mirror, seeing what happened in my past, I’m able to look past the bad and hope for only the good.

Because time changes many things. It changes feelings and emotions just as much as the silver stubble catching light on my chin. And much like the new feelings and emotions, I think I’ll keep it.

What you decide to do is up to you.