We Hold Ourselves Back
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I found myself in a predicament. It’d been over a month since I parted ways with someone I was seeing for a month. Still, I was having trouble moving on. The sadness of not being with her anymore had passed, but there was something else that was holding me back. There was something I couldn’t get off my mind that was bothering me.
Things were good between us before we ended. We saw each other a few times a week. When we were together we were very close; we shared a lot. Then she pulled back, and I dealt with it. We had “the talk.” She wasn’t looking for anything serious. Neither was I. In fact, I wasn’t looking for anything at all. It just happened. And when it happens for me, I tend usually to not hold back. I have faulty brakes, I guess you could say. But she was set on what she wanted, and what she didn’t want was a serious relationship.
So in the end we called it off. We decided to just be friends. I did my grieving thing. We stayed out of contact for a couple of weeks, me because I needed to not be around her, and her, well, I think she was trying to respect that.
We started to come into contact again, because it’s not a big town and many of the social events involve a lot of the same people. “Hey, let’s meet up for a drink some time,” we’d say to each other. It was almost always me leaving the ball in her court.
No calls. No texts. No messages. Silence. This silence started to bother me. It was one of those loud silences. Although the sadness had passed, I still found myself thinking about her a lot. Why am I not letting this go? I wondered. I was perplexed. I was perplexed at how such a nice connection between two people went from 50 to zero in 1.3 seconds flat. From this great time spent together to absolutely nothing.
When we agreed that we’d go back to being friends, I took it at face value. We were friends before, we were both mature and both understood why it couldn’t work. Going back to being friends did not seem like a big deal (which raises the question again, can men and women be friends?)
I wanted nothing more than to ask her, why? Why did you completely cut me out of your life? How could you show me such caring and attention and enjoy being around me as much as you did, then just turn your back? These were the questions that were burning inside me, and what I felt was holding me back. If I could just get some answers, I’d be able to really move on, I thought.
But the more I thought about it, and the more feedback I got from friends, the more I realized that it was fruitless. Sometimes — a lot of the time — talk is cheap. Not everything needs to be discussed.
I realized how selfish it was of me. The only reason to bring it up was to ease my discomfort. But what about her? Was it worth it to potentially make her uncomfortable? Would it really matter what she said?
In the end I decided to leave it, that this was something that I would just have to deal with. This was my problem, not hers. It wasn’t her preventing me from moving on, it was me.
Related tags: The Truth About Men