Why do we romanticize relationships we were miserable inside of?

There was a version of myself I created specifically to be easy to love. I called her the chill girlfriend, although I don't think I ever consciously gave her that name while I was being her. She wasn't insecure. She wasn't jealous. She definitely wasn't going to be the crazy girlfriend asking who some girl was or why her boyfriend was talking to her. She trusted her boyfriend because why would you date someone you don't trust? At least, that was the logic. If he wanted to make plans with his friends, he made them. If he wanted to hang out with my friends, that was fine too. I didn't ask when I would see him next. I waited for him to tell me when he was available, and then I made myself available. I didn't ask to call or FaceTime much either. I wanted everything to feel effortless, and apparently I thought effortless meant never admitting that I wanted anything.

The problem was that the chill girlfriend wasn't actually me.

I noticed the women. I noticed that there always seemed to be women around him and that he seemed much more interested in maintaining friendships with women than with men. I noticed how often they talked and wondered what there could possibly be to talk about every single day. Snapchat bothered me especially because something about constantly exchanging pictures with other women while you're in a relationship didn't feel innocent to me, but I didn't say much. If he mentioned a girl, I couldn't ask too many questions because then what would that make me? Jealous? Insecure? Controlling? I had been in a serious relationship before where I never worried about women. They existed around my boyfriend and I simply did not care because nothing in me felt like I needed to. I knew what trust felt like. Somehow, in this relationship, I convinced myself that trust meant ignoring the feeling that something wasn't right.

Maybe I had absorbed this idea from dating as an adult, from hearing people talk about having options and rosters and not wanting someone who was “crazy.” There always seemed to be this invisible competition over who could care less. A woman who asked questions was insecure. A woman who didn't care was confident. So I tried very hard to be confident.

Then I went through his phone and found out that the annoying little voice inside me had been right.

There were compliments to other women about how good they looked and how much he liked something they were wearing. There were women he'd hooked up with before our relationship who he had told me he had never been involved with. There were old nude pictures still saved in conversations with women he was currently talking to every day. There was flirting. One woman was surprised and upset when she learned he had a girlfriend and asked him to meet up. He didn't tell her no because he had a girlfriend. He told her he wasn't available on the day she suggested.

I remember thinking about all the times I had swallowed a question because I didn't want to look insecure. That might have hurt almost as much as what I found. My instincts had been telling me something and I had been actively arguing against myself on his behalf.

The strangest part is that the relationship actually got better afterward.

He removed the women. He blocked people, deleted numbers and contacts, distanced himself from people, and eventually deleted Snapchat entirely. Before that, we were seeing each other maybe once or twice a week. Afterward, we were together constantly. He became incredibly attached to me. The possibility of me leaving devastated him. He cried. He carried guilt. He talked about us getting our first apartment and having children. In some ways, after he betrayed me, I finally got the version of him I had wanted before he did it.

I remember wondering why I had to be hurt that badly for him to become that person. Why did it take me finding everything for you to decide that this relationship was something you couldn't lose? Why didn't you think about me when you were looking down at your phone and typing those things? At what point, if any, did it occur to you that what you were doing would hurt me?

I think his guilt made me feel safe, which is a strange sentence to write. I didn't enjoy watching him cry, and I didn't want him miserable, but there was something reassuring about knowing that he knew what he had done. Before, I had been the girlfriend trying not to care too much. Suddenly, he was the one terrified that I would leave. The power had shifted. I didn't trust him the same way anymore, but somehow I felt more secure in his desire to keep me.

I was probably more in love with him toward the end than I had been at the beginning, but I was also more miserable. Those things apparently can coexist.

I wrote about it constantly. I wrote about how sad I was that someone I would never have done this to had done it to me. I brought the women up repeatedly. I could be cold. I gave him the silent treatment instead of explaining that I didn't want to talk. Sometimes I made him chase me. If I was upset, he became upset. If we were good, he was great. My mood started determining his, and eventually he told me that he felt almost obsessed with me. He had tried to fix everything he had done, and somehow it was never enough.

He wasn't entirely wrong about that.

For a long time after the relationship ended, I tortured myself with the idea that if I chose to stay after what I found, then I had forfeited my right to keep being hurt by it. I stayed, therefore I should have forgiven him. I stayed, therefore I shouldn't have brought it up anymore. I stayed, therefore my resentment became my own fault.

I don't believe that as harshly anymore.

I do think I made a mistake by staying. Not because everyone who gets betrayed needs to leave, but because I knew myself. I knew, the day I went through that phone, that something in the relationship had died for me. Instead of admitting that, I immediately started trying to build a new relationship on top of the dead one. I wish I had spent time alone before deciding anything. I wish I had asked myself whether this was something I could genuinely put in the past rather than deciding that forgiveness was something I could perform until eventually I felt it. I stayed knowing I couldn't forget, and then I punished both of us because I couldn't forget.

There is accountability in that. I don't need to turn him into a monster to forgive myself, and I don't need to turn myself into one to acknowledge what I did wrong.

What still gets me is how it ended.

He ended the relationship abruptly, and suddenly it felt as though the entire history of us had been rewritten. He talked about how hard he had tried to fix his mistakes, how he had removed the women and centered his life around me, how my unhappiness made him unhappy and how nothing he did seemed to be enough. My reactions became the story. The silent treatment. My anger. My inability to let things go. The ways I had hurt him.

The context started disappearing.

I think that's when I began romanticizing him.

Not because I wanted him back. That's the weird part. Even while we were together, I don't think I ever truly imagined us settled somewhere, combining our lives and starting a family. When he talked about children or how much he thought about our first apartment, something about it always felt strange to me. Somewhere inside myself, I think I always knew the relationship had an expiration date. I thought about leaving constantly. I wasn't head over heels. I had been unhappy even before I discovered the women.

But after he left, suddenly I needed him to have been wonderful.

I started talking about how much I loved him and how he had actually been a good boyfriend. I told myself I had focused too much on the negative. I wondered whether I had made him feel like he wasn't good enough for me. My sister was one of the only people who knew the truth because I had hidden so much of the relationship from everyone else. I wanted my friends and family to think I had this great guy. She was the one person I had actually told everything to, so when I started praising him afterward, she basically told me I was talking out of my ass. I had been miserable, and she knew it because I had told her I was miserable when I had no reason to rewrite the story yet.

That was difficult to reconcile with what my own brain was doing.

I remembered our communication. I remembered the inside jokes. I remembered having someone to text good morning, someone to eat with, call, have sex with, make plans with and tell things to. I remembered that he had been my friend before he was my boyfriend. We had known each other when we were younger, and I knew he'd found me beautiful for years. He made me feel beautiful in a way that felt uncomplicated. He would pick me up like I weighed nothing and tell me I was so light. He loved the way I dressed. He loved my face and my body. He paid attention to my goals, asked about what I was studying, listened when I talked about literature and biology, and believed I was smart. He once told me that I noticed tiny details about things, and I remember that because nobody had ever described me that way before.

I don't need to pretend those things weren't real just because other things were.

Even the women never made me think I wasn't attractive enough. Maybe that sounds arrogant, but it's true. I didn't look at them and wonder what they had that I didn't. I thought his behavior had much more to do with something he needed from their attention than something I lacked. My body wasn't what the betrayal made me question.

My judgment was.

How could someone make me feel so seen and still behave in ways that made me feel so disregarded? How could the person crying because he was terrified of losing me become so cold once he decided he was done? How could someone contain both versions?

That was the part I couldn't understand.

I think I wanted to decide one of them had been fake. It would have been easier. Either the sweet boyfriend had been an act, or the cruel person at the end wasn't really him. But people aren't usually that convenient. I think both were him. The person who made me feel beautiful was him. The person who lied was him. The person who listened to me talk about school was him. The person flirting with women on his phone was him. The person crying because I might leave was him. The person who eventually became cold enough that I barely recognized him was also him.

Maybe my mistake was thinking that one version had to cancel out the others.

When the breakup actually happened, my reaction was embarrassingly dramatic considering I didn't even want him back. I stopped eating. I stopped showing up to work. I couldn't concentrate. I was anxious, exhausted and completely unmotivated. I checked his social media constantly. I spent as much time as possible with my girlfriends. I kept looking at my phone. I remember the first night being incredibly hard, but I remember the first morning being worse in a quieter way. There was suddenly nobody there. No good morning. No routine. Nothing to check except the absence of what had been there yesterday.

It almost felt like withdrawal, which, annoyingly, isn't that ridiculous from a biological perspective. Our brains learn people. They learn the little rewards associated with a name appearing on a screen, a voice, sex, affection, routines, inside jokes and the expectation that a certain person will be there. Memory isn't a video recording either. We rebuild memories when we recall them, and emotion affects what gets pulled forward. Losing someone can make the brain reach for familiar rewards and comforting memories even when another part of you knows the relationship wasn't making you happy.

My body was grieving something my mind didn't actually want back.

I think that confused me more than anything.

If I didn't want him, why couldn't I eat? If I had thought about leaving so many times, why was I staring at my phone? If I knew I had been unhappy, why could I suddenly remember every good thing about him and almost none of the nights when I had been alone writing the truth in my journal?

I genuinely forgot those nights for a while.

That's the part that fascinates me now. There had been a version of me sitting alone with absolutely nothing to prove to anybody, writing down how unhappy she was. She existed before I found the women. She existed before the breakup. She wasn't trying to make him the villain or herself the victim. Nobody was reading it. She was just telling herself the truth.

And after the breakup, I barely remembered her.

Instead, I started building a case against myself.

Maybe I should have communicated better. Maybe I shouldn't have given him the silent treatment. Maybe I shouldn't have made him chase me. Maybe I shouldn't have brought up the women after choosing to stay. Maybe I made him feel like he could never do enough. Maybe I ruined something good because I couldn't stop looking at something bad.

Some of those maybes contain truth. I could have communicated better. I shouldn't have used silence as punishment. I should have either worked toward forgiveness or admitted I couldn't forgive and left. I can apologize to myself for those things now without using them as evidence that everything else didn't happen.

At the time, though, I wanted him to regret losing me.

For a while I thought that meant I still loved him. I don't think it did.

I wanted him to say, “I fucked up.” I wanted him to miss me. I wanted him to eventually look back and understand what he had lost. I even hated the idea that he might become better for another woman, that I had gone through all of the difficult parts and taught him things about being in a serious relationship only for somebody else to get the version of him I had been waiting for.

But underneath all of that was something much more embarrassing.

I had changed myself for him.

I had been the chill girlfriend when I wasn't chill. I had minimized things that bothered me. I had tried not to ask for too much time. I had tried not to seem jealous. I had accepted things I didn't actually accept. Then, when everything fell apart, I begged someone who had become incredibly cold to tell me that he missed me, that he felt differently, that there was still something there.

That's the part I cringe at now.

I think I needed his regret to make my self-abandonment worth something. If he regretted losing me, then maybe I hadn't made such a fool of myself. Maybe all the times I made myself smaller, easier, quieter and more convenient had at least resulted in being unforgettable. Maybe I could turn shame into proof that I had mattered.

He never gave me that in the way I wanted.

Eventually, I had to live without it.

Time did something strange after that. The bad memories came back first, and for a while they were almost funny. He went back to talking to some of the same women, which initially hurt and eventually just made me think, of course you did. It became so predictable that it stopped feeling personal. The good memories faded for a while too, then occasionally wandered back in. An inside joke. A conversation. A memory of being picked up like I weighed nothing. His family, who had made me feel welcomed and cared for. None of those memories made me want him back. They just became things that happened to me once.

I don't think that relationship was secretly beautiful. I don't think he was the love of my life. I don't even know whether I would describe what we had as some great love at all. It was a relationship. It had tenderness and friendship and attraction and betrayal and resentment and comfort and dishonesty and laughter and a lot of confusion. I don't need to make it more significant now simply because it hurt when it ended.

I also don't think the lesson is that I should stop looking for the good in people.

That is actually one of the things I miss about who I was then. I liked that girl. She wanted to believe people were complicated without immediately assuming the worst of them. She looked for the good. I don't want heartbreak to turn her into someone suspicious of everyone she loves.

I just wish she had understood that seeing the good in someone doesn't require cropping the rest of the picture.

A bad part doesn't erase all the color around it. Someone hurting you doesn't mean every laugh was fake or every tender moment was manipulation. But the opposite is true too. The beautiful parts don't erase what hurt. You can't keep zooming into whichever corner of the portrait supports the story you want to believe that day and call that the whole person.

I think that's what I was doing after the breakup. He handed me a version of the story where I had ruined everything, and for a while I searched my memories for evidence that he was right. I pulled forward every kind thing he had ever done and pushed away the version of myself who had been miserable long before he left. I romanticized the relationship because admitting the whole truth meant admitting something much harder than simply missing a man.

I had abandoned myself inside something I already knew wasn't right for me.

I had known.

That's the part that still stings more than losing him ever did.

If he called me now and said everything I once begged him to say, I think my heart would probably race when I saw his name. I'd read it. I'd probably stare at it longer than I would like to admit. But I don't think I would respond. There isn't anything I need him to tell me anymore because the apology I wanted from him was never really going to fix what I was ashamed of in myself.

I don't need him to regret losing me to prove that I shouldn't have lost myself.

Maybe that's why I don't romanticize it anymore. I can remember him being good to me without deciding he was good for me. I can admit that I behaved badly without accepting that I was the villain. I can remember being loved without calling it the love of my life. I can remember being hurt without pretending every moment before it was a lie.

And I can remember the girl who sat alone writing in her journal while she was still inside the relationship, telling herself the truth before anybody else had a version of the story to give her.

I think I trust her now.