I’m sure others have similar stories. Back in high school (many years ago), I dated a girl I fell head over heels for. I had dated before, but it was different with her. I don’t know how to explain it other than sometimes you make a connection with someone that is so strong, you didn’t know you could feel that way about another person until you experience it. Within a few months I had fallen in love for the first time.
That’s when the trouble started. Aside from being an awkward teenage boy, I had never been encouraged as a child to share my feelings. I had grown up learning how to bottle them up inside. Furthermore, I felt a little crazy for feeling this way so quickly, and thought there was no way she could feel the same. I struggled with how to open up to her, and it started building insecurities in me. I began pulling away from her, and I know she could feel me distancing myself.
Around the same time, we got in a fight over something stupid that I instigated. It was really just me projecting my insecurities back onto her. I think between that and the fact that I had become so distant, she had enough. I escalated the fight, and during the argument I asked if she just wanted to break up, she said yes. I was devastated. But I still couldn’t open up to her, or tell her the truth about how I really felt. About how much she meant to me, and how much I didn’t want to lose her.
I acted like I was fine, and that I wanted to break up just as much as she did. I pushed for us to remain friends though, because I couldn’t bare to not talk to this person that meant so much to me. And we did remain friends, for years. Awkwardly at first, but we found a way. We moved on and started seeing other people, we just ignored the fact that we ever dated, and never discussed it. I guess that was our way of making the friendship work.
After a few years, and being away at college, we started to lose touch. I don’t think it was intentional, it just started to happen naturally like it often does with high school friends. Around this time, she ran into some of my friends and for whatever reason they expressed how hard I took our breakup. This was difficult for her to hear not only because I never told her that, but also because of the way things ended. She really believed I didn’t want to be with her. After this we spoke for the first time in a while, and finally discussed our relationship. It was like discussing the elephant in the room that we had successfully ignored for years.
She expressed remorse for how things went. Even then though, I couldn’t tell her how I had really felt. This time because it was years later, we were both seeing other people, and we had been really good friends since. Saying it just felt wrong. So I expressed some remorse as well, and told her I knew she did the right thing by breaking things off (which I really did believe, I obviously wasn’t ready for a serious relationship). That’s the last time I remember us talking. I suppose we both got a little bit of the closure that we didn’t have before.
So why post this now? I honestly hadn’t thought about any of this in years. But she popped up in a dream recently, and it just made me reflect on things. It’s odd looking back at that teenage boy, because it seems so obvious now what I should have done. There is some guilt in how I made her feel. There is some regret in that I didn’t get to enjoy my ”first love”, and that she’ll never know the truth about how I felt about her. But I know I did the best I could back then, and I’m grateful we were able to be friends afterwards. At least because of that, she knew I cared about her.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I guess the moral of the story is don’t bottle your feelings up inside. Be open and honest with the people you care about most. I learned that the hard way, but you don’t have to.