Why I Broke Up with the Person I Wanted to Spend My Life With

Originally completed February 6, 2016.

We were in very different places at formative times in our lives. Our love wasn’t “wrong.” It was meant for us to help one another grow in certain aspects and then wish us well on our journeys. It was our trying to make forever what was meant to be a season that damaged us so deeply.

Everyone loved being around us because we were so in love. My brother actually said that about a year after we broke up, explaining why he and others had tried to get us to stay together when we both had called him separately to confess that we were miserable: “Seeing you two together made me so happy, so I wanted you to be happy together.” And we had made one another happy—until we didn’t. I utterly adored his heart, and it challenged me to grow as a person.

Oddly, I can’t say specifically what drew him to me. I know he loved me, but I never thought to ask, so I don’t really know what about me lit him up. But I know he loved me—even when I was angry and hurt and pained that we ended, I never doubted that. Hell, it’s why I was angry, hurt, and pained. It didn’t make sense that we could have and still loved one another so much, and yet were not fitting together.

It was hard for me to see clearly what kept nudging at me in the time that we were together, but now I understand that I kept running into the wall that our initial and mutual attraction around “building a better world” became something about which we mused rather than towards what we moved together. We silently and unconsciously negotiated great lives down to becoming “good people”—our mutual passion was why we fell in love, but unable to harness its imagination and inspiration beyond being in love with being in love, we settled on the latter.

We gradually morphed from high school program team leaders who had excited conversations about working with our youth and what we would do with it in the future, into that couple that only talked about great restaurants and our next fun thing to do; caring about the world beyond us dissolved into this abstract ideal that was the reason we’d fallen in love, but was no longer who we were together, if ever it had been.

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It became more pronounced after we moved in together. Putting the house together was so telling in that rather than combine and streamline the belongings of our lives, we instead compromised based upon what the other person didn’t ardently object to. Everything else went into storage. Living together starkly highlighted that we connected so long as we agreed to stand still or not pull the other too far our way; shifting in any way forced us to acknowledge that walking in the direction each of us felt called left us terrified that we would be pulled apart. And we didn’t want to let go.

So instead of building a life that was one of our dreams or a collaboration of our dreams, we focused on constructing a façade of a life in which we were “okay.” I prayed at one point to be okay with “okay”—to learn to just live me and live the passion we’d so loved through my life, and not feel like we needed to do it. But that wasn’t who we said we were, and I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just become what we had said and dreamed, or even why we couldn’t just get a new dream. I didn’t understand why we had this fire that now only sometimes caught, and never blazed.

And it’s because, regardless of why, being in love with being in love means that that love becomes the most beautiful of black holes: we become enamored of watching the light and energy being drawn into the curious nothingness, and then too late realize that while we were lost in gazing, the gravity consumed our very selves. And we had to keep gazing at our ourselves, because looking anywhere else would have forced us to admit that we had passed that moment in which we should have floated off into different orbits.

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We grew so much because of one another, and I learned so much because of and from him that I could never fully explain to or thank him for. And I wanted to keep that going because it didn’t make sense that we couldn’t. Honestly, it also reached a point that it seemed easier to remain there; we made “paper” and even mind sense, though it never felt quite right.

It finally took God outright speaking to me what I had been working so hard to avoid admitting no matter how evident it had become: I had to let go. Through all of my crying—I didn’t want to hurt him; I couldn’t; I wouldn’t—God finally broke through with this reality: if life with him wasn’t what God intended for me, then life with me wasn’t what God intended for him. In all of the ways that I had negotiated myself away to maintain the relationship, which ironically then included truly loving him, my last opportunity to demonstrate that I genuinely loved him more than I loved the concept of us was to let him go. I had to give him the opportunity to find the person who lights him up and inspires him to remain lit not for them, but for their lives.

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And on this side of everything, with the clarity and distance from the relationship, I know that the life we would have had is not at all the life I envision, desire, and feel called to today. And I have a feeling that the same is true for him. I learned from him how to dream, and yet with him I would never have dreamed of pursuing ordination because I hadn’t been pursuing my walk with God because I had preoccupied myself pursuing our relationship. Without pursuing ordination, I wouldn’t have commenced the journey to discover who I truly am and so what I want to do with my life; I would probably still be sitting at Ohio CASA trying to figure out why I love our folks and still can’t just love my job?

Without ending the relationship, I would have settled in life in so many ways and never have understood or known that. It is to this day the most difficult choice I’ve ever made. And yet the day that God showed me to break up with the person I wanted to spend my life with is actually the day I took my first official step towards consciously discovering and living my life.

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The most difficult part of our relationship ending the way that it did was hurting so badly someone that I loved so much. And I recognized that, while I will never be perfect, going forward I need to do a better job of knowing what my life is looking for in itself, and then listening to God in what person or type of person actually fits with that. Looking back on this relationship and peering into potential relationships since then, I’m now fairly certain who that is.

I want the person who wants with me not to fight for a relationship between us, but a relationship that generates love and peace through, because of, and beyond us.

I want the person who wants with me to live deeply and make as much an impact as we are able. I want the person who wants with me that we stand together in the realities of life rather than building a cocoon from them. Sometimes it will be hard and sometimes it will be wonderful, but in all times we remember that we’re here to love and inspire each other in living this life for real and together. I want us to build a home that creates joy, and a haven and respite for others because our love is so inviting, nurturing, and supportive.

I want the person who agrees with me that we’re not aiming for perfect, but we do challenge ourselves to continue becoming and discovering who we are and what we can do in this life—that settling is a form of living death.

I want the person who agrees that we give our everything not into us, but into what we can imagine and co-create because of who we are together and encourage one another to be.

My forever is the person who wants with me to dream, build, and create in ways that last beyond our lifetimes.

Three years ago I thought that I was overreaching and asking “too much”—that’s what some family and friends kept telling me, and that’s because by typical human standards that’s considered true.

But learning and knowing my life means I now have no doubt that this who I am; it’s who I’ve always been, and getting ready for the great person will be more than worth all of the “okay” and even “good“ relationships I could already have attached to.

And I know now that I’d much rather wait.