Yep. You.
First off, failed is in quotes for lack of a better word. Think of it more as all your relationships that didn't work out :) (It's important because someone I once shared this with told me "that relationship didn't fail, it just didn't work out" LOL! Guess some people just dislike the word fail)
Bargaining.
From the time he left I had never once though of getting back together. But if he came back during this period, I just might have considered it. Or not.
In as much as I was still dealing with my pain on the side, I was in a much better place. There's times I would genuinely have good days. I didn't feel guilty about smiling or laughing or being happy anymore. My good and bad days were almost balancing out.
But the manner in which things ended kept weight heavily on my mind. It was actually in this moment a lot heavier than it had ever been. As I'd mentioned before, his leaving never made sense to me. And I desperately needed to make sense out of it because I felt that the only way I could genuinely move on is if it made sense.
I'd turned on him, I'd turned on God and now I was beginning to turn on myself. I thought that maybe if i had refused to give him space when he asked for it, things would have gone down differently. I though that maybe I should have tried harder, fought more. Maybe I shouldn't have been so stringent during the planning- see the thing is I'm a planner and he was more of a free spirit. I had timelines and deadlines for everything, and I begun to wonder if that is what drove him away.
I looked back to the four week silence. I beat myself up about things that I convinced myself I should have handled differently. In retrospect, i wouldn't have changed a thing.
I looked back to our entire relationship. Those periods when things had been so hard and when I just wanted to give up. I wondered if I was foolish for choosing to fight for us. I thought back to our very first big fight. Maybe I should have just called it quits then. I thought back to how we barely made it through year three. Maybe it wasn't worth the trouble.
In all this it didn't help that he was everywhere. All my best and most important memories, he was there. He was in all my graduation photos. He was in all our family events. Like he was literally EVERYWHERE.
But even through the bad, this is the period when all the good things flooded back as well. We were good together? Why would he throw that away? I knew him so well, he knew me so well. We'd put so much into this. Like seriously. Even when all the odds were against us. So what was all that for? I honestly knew that we had been through a lot worse, and somehow still got to the other side.. It just did not make any sense. So I questioned whether he had truly loved me to begin with.. I wondered why everything I had to give was not enough to make him stay. And trust me, I am a pretty top quality girlfriend :)
No answers..
But one thing did become abundantly clear- this was not on me. This was not my fault. There's nothing I could have done to make him stay, there's nothing I did to chase him away. His decision to leave or stay was his to make, and there's very little I could do about that. Are there things that could have been better with us? Most definitely. I believe every relationship always has room for improvement. However, the decision to stay and fight for it or pack up and leave rests with you as an individual. It has to be yours. Your partner can't be responsible for that.
It takes two to make a relationship work, and if one party is sold out of it.. well..
And so in as much as I had all these endless questions that didn't seem to have answers, I decided to make peace with the fact that I would probably never get the answers I desired to get. And no matter how much I replayed what happened in my mind, what happened, happened. There was no turning back on it. From the looks of things, he wasn't coming back. And even if he did, I had no intention of taking him back. So what was the point?
All I'm saying is that it's not on you. Especially when you know your heart is true, genuine and honest. It is not on you to make your partner keep their word. It should never be your responsibility to ensure that your partner stays committed to a commitment they made to you.
You may have all the should haves, could haves and would haves, but at the end of the day you can't keep making excuses. That's far too big a burden to carry on your shoulders for the rest of your life. At least for me, it was a burden I refused to carry.
I did feel like I had failed, but as time went by I realized that I hadn't. The relationship may have failed, but as a person- I hadn't. I was true to myself, and I gave the best that I could. And only upon realizing this was I finally able to accept what had happened.
''Failure is inevitable, unavoidable but failure should never get the last word. You have to hold on to what you want. You have to not take no for an answer and take what’s coming to you. Never give in, never give up. Stand up. Stand up and take it."
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