Getting over breaking up

Breaking up is hard to do, the song goes, but what’s really hard is, getting over breaking up with someone. Even when it’s clear, in retrospect, that the relationship really wasn’t right.

And I knew it wasn’t, even when we were in the midst of it – at least at times. The three-hour drive each weekend – and her refusal to make the drive herself, meaning I had to go there most of the time. Which meant sacrificing my weekends at home when I used to brew beer, play cards with friends, tend my garden, clean house – spending them instead in a strange place that never felt like home.

There were other signs. I met almost none of her Seattle friends. The arguments that seemed to come out of nowhere; sometimes she picked fights with me just “to reconnect emotionally,” she’d say. “I get tired of the weather reports.”  Our differences, such as her way of “simultaneous talking” that I felt was just rude interruption; her varying enthusiasm for adopting children (she was no longer able to have them); our age difference – and the fact that she lied about her age at first. Her rigidity, even obsessiveness, about things like hand-washing and never allowing street clothes to touch the sheets. How I never felt good enough for her. How much appearances meant to her, and how little to me.

Before this turns into a rag sheet, I want to return to the point, which is:  I’m not happy with how it ended, even though I know it was right to end it. In my life, most of my relationships have ended amicably, each of us retaining respect for the other and remaining friends. My ex-wife and I took almost a year to get divorced, taking our time principally to keep the pressure off and keep it civil. We’re still friends and we still get together with each other’s family from time to time.

But not this last one. She raged at me and said I was a “mean, cold-hearted man,” while lying next to me in my bed. She said she didn’t want to accept any of my Christmas presents – she didn’t want reminders of me around her house. (She changed her mind in the morning.) We spent a three-hour drive back to Seattle not talking. There was no hug good-bye; in fact there was no real good-bye. I just went out to my car, cried for a minute or so, then drove back to Portland.

I wrote her an email a few days later, apologizing for my part and explaining my feelings on the matter. She called to thank me and said she wanted to keep trying. You could have knocked me over with a feather. After an hour of talking I said:  it still feels to me that we have the same issues we had last week. I need a little time to process the pain – a break. She said, forget it then. She never said, “I’m sorry.”

She scoffed at my suggestion that we try to stay in touch and remain friends, saying “What does that mean? Are you going to visit me in Seattle? Will I visit you in Portland? I don’t see it happening.” When I offered to keep her informed about my dad’s failing health – a man she’d recently met and said she adored – she said, no thanks; she didn’t want to be “added to one of [my] email lists.”

And I’m the cold, mean one?

Why? Because I wouldn’t yell and scream like she did?

Maybe I should have. Maybe then I’d have better feelings of closure than I do now.