So this guy and I broke up, and I’m sad that we won’t get to play the bracelet game any more. Does that make me an arsehole? That upon breaking up with a good, kind man the thought which burns brightest in my mind isn’t guilt or soppiness but horny nostalgia? I don’t know. But as he said to me at the end, with characteristic grace: at least we were honest with each other. We were. I honestly wanted to shag him and get drunk and play Magic: the Gathering, he honestly wanted something more. I am, honestly, a bit of an arsehole right now.
Homebase
The first time we talk about what we are to each other I tell him “I like you a lot.” But I also explain that I’ve only just escaped a massive, buy-a-house-and-plan-your-lives-together relationship. One which, if I’m honest, still isn’t properly over and won’t be fully done for quite a while – it takes a lot of time to unpick shared lives, and my hands are so full doing it that it’s hard to carry new stuff.
What’s more, I’m not keen to leap straight into new responsibility or commitment. I wish I’d met him later, in at least a year’s time, when I’d had a decent run of plague-free singledom – shagging friends and planning gang bangs and meeting men who have more important things to do than get emotional about a scruffy slag like me. He tells me ‘I get it,’ which is what I need to hear.
The next time we talk about what we are, it’s on a video call with his friends. One of them casually refers to me as ‘your… umm… sorry I don’t know.’ They might mean ‘girlfriend’ or ‘lover’ or ‘fuck buddy’ but the sentence has started and they don’t know how to finish it – one of us has to step up and slap a label there, because suddenly the absence of a word pulses heavily in the silence.
He turns to me casually and says ‘partner…?’ Question mark. Partner? Sure.
We have a nice time and move on, because we’re good people and we know how to handle awkwardness like grown ups. Except as regular readers will know, I am definitely not a grown-up, I am still a frightened child.
The word ‘partner’ feels so big. So significant. So much like a huge sign that reads ‘DANGER: you will hurt this man’ that I cannot help but twist myself in knots when trying it on. What shape should I form to fit this new mould? How can I articulate what I think I am and am not? I contemplate the too-short list of ‘what I can offer’ versus the encyclopaedia of ‘what I can’t‘, and the best of what I can do feels like less than he deserves.
I remind myself that although commitment and constancy aren’t possible right now, I can still do my best to be honest. So I tell him:
I like you a lot. But I’m worried you might be betting your heart on a risky prospect. I’m not sure what I can offer beyond fun and chat and fucking and wine and jokes and stories. I like being with you, but I also love being alone. I am only recently learning what freedom looks like, and I’m sad and fucked-up and a trashfire right now. I’ll probably start a lot more fires while I sort my shit out, and I don’t want to burn you in the process.
Except when I say it in real life, it sounds way less like a wanky film script. But it’s something like that: the fires and the burning. And when I tell him how I feel he replies:
I get it. You need to start fires. But sometimes starting fires is exhausting, and you want to return to your home base for a rest. If you’re up for it, I’d like to be your home base.
Responsibility
What a fucking lovely thing to say. And it’s a relaxing, selfish, pleasurable dream isn’t it? I’d love to have all the nice relationship stuff without the other ‘r’ that comes with it: responsibility. That’s what the trashfire version of me is gagging for. A home base, a friend, a lover who’ll be there when I need him but leave me be when I’m busy elsewhere. Someone who’ll embrace me and enjoy me during strictly-boundaried hours, then let me run away when time is up.
But that isn’t how people work. They aren’t appliances you can switch on and off when you want to. The person who wanted to be my home base didn’t disappear when I wasn’t looking, or forget the things we’d done when we were no longer together doing them. And each time I saw him I realised that the responsibility I was trying to dodge with words was still being nurtured by my actions. And the more I pulled away the more he wanted to hold me. Then the tighter he held me, the harder I struggled. I didn’t want a relationship, but a relationship was happening, and saying ‘no it isn’t’ wasn’t fair or true or kind.
And the panic beating in my chest every time I thought about what we were grew bigger and bigger and bigger until it became utterly monstrous. And I grew monstrous with it – rude and snappy and anxious and squirming to get out, even when I knew that ‘in’ was a pretty nice place to be.
So I broke up with my support bubble dude. The guy who invented the bracelet game and spanked the ‘sorry’ out of me, and delivered such an epic struggle-fuck that it powered a week’s worth of wanks. The lovely man who made me gyūdon because he knew how much I loved it, and nearly choked on his tea when I asked him to come in my mouth.
I’ve spent a long time trying to work out if it’s either inappropriate or superfluous to write a post about this. My calibration of these things is entirely skewed by the fact that the last guy was here for so many years – enough to make six months seems like no more than a commercial break. I came down on the side of writing something, even though it isn’t very good, because just glossing over this and starting to merrily chat about other things would feel dismissive – like Homebase was a tiny walk-on bit-part character who doesn’t deserve a goodbye. But he does. He may not have been right for me right now, but he was important. And we had a lot of fun.
7 Comments
I think that in a situation like this it’s fine to be a asshole cause not being one is worse in the long run
As for writing about it, I’m sure that it helped you to sort some of it out.
And if he reads it, he will know he was important
Goodness, G. You’re not being an arsehole at all. I think one of the most important parts of all this, was the bit you mentioned right at the start – you were honest with each other. I know that phrases that start with ‘at least’ are often an indication that what follows will be at best a consolaton rather than the totality of what anyone really wants. But being honest with each other deserves a bit more than ‘at least’; it’s not trivial, it’s really, really important.
And neither is you writing about it either superfluous or inappropriate, because it can be neither of those things. It can’t be superfluous if writing it (even if you hadn’t published it) helped you at all. And it would only – possibly – inappropriate if you were saying things to us, that ought better to have been said, to him. But my strong impression from what you’d written is that everything between the two of you that should have been said, was.
So you’re not being an arsehole. It’s entirely possible for things to end and for there to be lots of pain all round, without that in itself being an indication of someone being arseholey. You took the actions you did at the time that you did, at least partly to minimise the pain to someone else.
That is a noble thing. Be gentle with yourself.
Being dishonest about where you’re currently at would’ve been the arsehole thing to do in this case. It doesn’t feel great either way, but you did a good thing, and the right thing here. Hang in there Girl, be good to yourself.
Wonderful post
Made me tear up a bit, there. Nope, not an arsehole. Just more honest and painfully insightful than most of us deserve.
In a world where you can choose to be what you want, choose to be kind. And reading this, it appears that you are. And being kind to *yourself* is where we start. A lovely post, and if i was him i’d be so honored by your writing. I like his concept of homebase, btw, it sounds like a good place to start some kind of polyerosy relationship and maybe he can find that on his path.
blessed be.
Thousands of years ago, I stood at a similar crossroads. To be or not to be an “arsehole”. I was young, maybe stupid. I chose to not be an “arsehole”. I should’ve been.
It only took breaking that person’s heart nearly 7 years later for me to learn the value of giving myself time to heal, and of acting genuinely according to my wishes and desires, instead of what I felt was expected of me.
And I’m lucky that my ex-partner is such a wonderful person, forgives me, and remains a friend to this day.
It’s been almost two years since then. I think I’ve almost forgiven myself enough that I may attempt dating.
I’m not gonna tell you it was the right choice. That you can decide. But it was an important choice.
The loss of the gyūdon, however, is unequivocally unforgivab- I joke. Never had it, but it looks delicious.