lessons I learned the hard way
September 4, 2025
this feels overdue!
one year ago today a boy broke my heart & while I have nothing to say to him, I do have some things to say to you
it’s clear to me that my highest calling is writing. healing out loud to help those who heal in silence. being completely honest of my humanity so other people can look at me & see their humanness, too. oversharing online is important to me because…like…what if someone needs to hear this?
although I am only a young, hot 27 1/2—when I reflect on my twenties, I cannot help but remember the years I spent in a relationship with someone I loved so very much. from the moment I met him to the second it ended 5 years later, I always loved him.
& sometimes, he loved me, too.
my last relationship ended because he slept with someone else. sometimes when I tell people that, they ask how I found out. the answer is he told me himself. he kissed me in his driveway the night before he left to go on a trip, left for a week, & came back someone who was completely unrecognizable to me. sat me down on my couch, told me how he had the best week of his life, described every detail (but one), & smiled the entire time until he got to the end of his story, recapping his entire week. then I said, “what else?”. I had a bad feeling I couldn’t shake. then he told me he slept with someone else. I knew her. he didn’t even tell me she was going on the trip with him and our friends. sometimes I tell people all of this & they respond back to me with “wow, at least he told you. it’s great that he told you”.
first of all, why are we praising someone for treating me with bare minimum human decency? not telling me is the bad thing, but that doesn’t mean telling me is the good thing. telling me is the very least he owed me after, again, being together for four years. after five years of best friendship. after being in every corner of each other’s lives. after investment. after multiple trips home. after emotional, physical, & spiritual intimacy. the good thing might’ve been apologizing, but I wouldn’t even know if I would consider that the good thing because he didn’t. he actually told me I was overreacting when I started crying. & as I’ve mentioned before in other writings—I had boob hickies fading on my body during this conversation. we had sat on his roof & cried about how much we loves each other only a month before.
second of all, he only told me because he wanted to pursue things with her. how could he date her if he was still seeing me?! get out of here with that “at least he told you” bullshit!!!!
okay, I’ll get off my soap box!!
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the past year. reflecting, ruminating, realizing. crying. spiraling. grieving. a lot of grieving. feeling grateful for endings–thank God empty love can be broken.
when I think about my ex, sometimes I still get lightheaded. I think it’s hard to rewire your brain from being completely in love with & addicted to someone to not feeling much at all for them. I look back on these formative years of my life & recognize the fact I wasn’t noticing everything going on. or I guess I was noticing, but not always connecting. I’d see 3+4=8, notice it wasn’t quite right, but wouldn’t comprehend “+1” was missing from the equation.
the first few months after we really ended our relationship, I was told a lot of things that showed me it was worse than I thought. a lot of it was stuff people thought I already knew, a lot of it was after-the-fact developments. coming to the realization you were being gaslit for years will have you believing you have brain damage. I have felt so disrespected as a human being I have wanted to peel my skin off. I have NO IDEA how he felt comfortable calling me his best friend for so long. how he cried to me & said I was more important to him than his family. not sure how he sleeps at night, to be honest. it’s hard to describe the feeling, but if you’ve felt it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. it’s earth shattering. it’s earth shattering. & just because I’ve carried it well (at times!!!!!!) this last year doesn’t mean it doesn’t still feel heavy on occasion.
anyway…!!! these are the lessons I learned the hard way
this is for 21 through 26-year-old me. but this is also for my friends in any type of relationship & are sure & also unsure. in love, but have a feeling in the back of their heart that something is off. maybe you’ve been with them a long time & you’ve seen them grow & they’ve seen you grow & you love their family & they’re your best friend & you can’t imagine life without them & you share a community & they know you better than anyone, but you’re also someone who says to themselves every once in a while: why can’t they be better? is this what it’s supposed to feel like? am I with the right person?
I am here today to talk to you about love that feels like love, but is maybe something else. it’s not not love, but it’s not quite love either. it’s something in the space between
“I am writing with a burnt hand about the nature of fire” – Ingeborg Bachmann
1. when someone tells you you deserve better, believe them
I’ve heard it & I’m sure you’ve heard it, too.
I think it’s really hard to look at ourselves objectively & even harder to look at ourselves with the amount of love it requires to actually offer ourselves the level of self-respect we deserve. I say this because I’m thinking about my friends—the ones who told me, gently & kindly, that I deserved better than what I was getting.
guess what—I didn’t believe them! I grew up not really feeling loved by my family so feeling loved sometimes by a guy felt great to me. the hits of dopamine from occasional love was soooo addictive to me. I’ve been in fight or flight my whole life–being in a relationship that kept me in that state didn’t raise a red flag to me. burnt children love fire! love made me blind to the hurt he was creating because while I felt wounded, I still felt love. & childhood me couldn’t say the same. I felt wounded, but not loved. no one would say you deserve better unless they meant it. & unless you deserve a lot better than you’re getting. there is so much love behind that phrase you deserve better. why wouldn’t you believe them?
& trust me, it’s even worse when your partner says that themselves. they are admitting to you that they cannot (or will not) meet your ultimate needs. & if you continue to stay with them, you are only showing them that bare minimum is enough for you.
it always frustrated me when I heard you deserve better because…like…why couldn’t they be better then? if I deserved it? & they knew that? I say this with love: they’re not! they’re not. & maybe you’ve seen glimpses of the better or the best version of them—who you know they could be. someone who is better. but that is not who they are. that is your projection of what you think they could become & who you want them to be. maybe they’ll be that better version for someone else, but that someone else might not be you. it wasn’t me!
2. once they know you’ll accept the bare minimum, they will always give you the bare minimum
I love this quote: if you let something slide, they’ll start ice skating
I remember who I was when I fell in love with my ex: sad. I was 21, unmedicated, & plagued with an anxious attachment style. accepting breadcrumbs. overthinking and over-analyzing. praying that something would finally work out for me, that someone would love me in the exact way I wanted to be loved.
that being said, cold water feels warm when your hands are freezing. once my ex knew my hands were freezing, he learned he could stay cold.
when I think of who I was back then, I hold her tenderly in my heart, but she lacks significantly compared to the person I am now. mostly in her emotional development & maturity. the version of myself I am today would not have fallen in love with a boy who gave me almost nothing. it’s okay to outgrow a relationship that once served a different version of you, but no longer does. it’s okay to grow up & change your mind.
I am embarrassed to admit this, but during my last phone conversation with my ex, 11 months and 19 days ago, he told me he knew he could get away with anything because I am “too forgiving”. he said, out loud to me on the phone, that we couldn’t be together because he knew he could mess up, apologize, & I would forgive him because I always believed he was genuinely sorry. even if he wasn’t. again, I’m embarrassed to admit someone thought so little of me that they would deliberately do things they knew would hurt me despite telling me they loved me. that is not love! I kept asking him why he would do this, why would he do that. never in these words, but we kept having the same conversation: “you keep hurting me” “because you keep letting me”.
if you show people you’ll stay through anything, they will drag you through everything.
3. the villain will always try to make you the bad guy
when I had that conversation with my ex when he said I am too forgiving, he framed it in a way that made him the victim. that he had to rid himself of me because I allowed him to be a bad person & he didn’t want to act that way anymore. God forbid he treat me better for the sake of treating me better. because I deserved it.
I have a friend who was in the horrible cycle of breakup & makeup with a girl who was clearly toxic. or at the very least, clearly not good for him. always convincing him that he was the problem in their relationship. telling him that he was a nice person, but not a good person. constantly waiting for him to mess up so she could make herself feel better about her objectively shitty behavior. it’s not my story to tell, but I think we all know stories like this one.
next time you’re telling someone the way in which they hurt you, I encourage you to ask yourself if they would forgive you for everything you’ve forgiven them for? do they apologize for doing the things they do to you or do they blame you for how you reacted?
4. hurt people hurt people & confused people confuse people
plain language: people can only know you as deeply as they know themselves & if you can look at someone & actively see something significant they’re ignoring & unwilling to face, you should look at that situation with a critical eye & ask yourself if you’re going to be collateral damage in their eventual self-destruction.
I think I knew how much my ex was hurting (struggling?) on a subconscious level, but I never put words to it. I mostly wrote it off. always joking with our friends about how he couldn’t be alone. knowing he had been jumping from relationship to relationship for years, but ignoring that blatant red flag (how you get them is how you lose them!!!!!!). “he just doesn’t know what he wants” & “his words just don’t align with his actions all the time”. at times, he left me confused. someone who loves you will not confuse you.
but I didn’t completely write off that feeling—a part of me felt like I was mourning the inevitable end of our relationship the entire time we were together. I knew something wasn’t quite right. I was in love, but resonating more with sad songs than love songs (tried to blame my depression). anticipatory grief. I love you so much that I know losing you will devastate me. I haven't lost you yet but I already miss you. we still have time, but it won't be enough. we can avoid this ending if I work harder to earn this. i’m so in love with you that the thought of not being together is incomprehensible, yet I have a feeling it’s coming. I don’t want to fall in love with anyone who isn’t you & I will drag myself through fire to avoid it.
5. just because you pick them, doesn’t mean they’re picking you!
my ex and I broke up twice (maaaaybe four times lol) & after the first real breakup he had a true mental breakdown in my living room. sobbed harder than I’ve ever seen anyone cry. lip quivering, tears streaming, nose running. he told me he thought I was the one & I believed him. why wouldn’t i?
to me, he wasn’t difficult to love, but I knew he was…a difficult person. he thought he was misunderstood, but the truth is that he’s kind of an asshole. judgmental & selfish. at the time, I thought of his flaws more as details. I know better now. I thought the fact I was choosing him despite his imperfections said something about me—about how deep love can be. about how I was good at loving because I loved anyway. how true love looks past flaws & accepts people for who they are.
but there isn’t a prize for “picking someone anyway”. you don’t win anything for staying in a relationship that ultimately isn’t conducive to your emotional & spiritual fulfillment. on the other hand, while you don’t win anything, it does say something about you. & it’s not that you have a big heart or that you’re a good person. it’s that you need more self-respect. getting to love him forever would have been my greatest joy—& it would have killed every good part of me. I was so focused on loving him that I didn’t notice he wasn’t really loving me back. like I said: burnt children love fire & I felt like he was loving me better than my family was. he was spending all his time with me, calling every day, welcoming me into his family, sleeping over multiple nights a week, but he wasn’t loving me. he wasn’t choosing me.
6. you think you’re being patient until you learn you’re wasting your time
I don’t think this one needs much explaining. with my ex, I thought I was being patient. waiting for him to get his shit together, waiting for him to grow up, waiting for him to be ready to move in together. waiting for him to be ready for our life. but that’s what I wanted for him. that’s not what he wanted. & when I learned that, when he told me he was going to pursue someone else, I immediately felt like I wasted years of my life on someone who was never going to be who I thought he was becoming. he was going an entirely different direction.
just because you want it to be them, doesn’t mean they want it to be you
7. just because you’re sad & you miss them, doesn’t mean you should text them or you want them back. just because you can’t stop thinking about someone doesn't mean it’s a sign to reconnect
the last few months of my 2024 were not pretty.
i had nightmares where I would scream at him & say exactly what I would’ve said if I had the chance in real life. i’d wake up emotionally exhausted & drained. i’d wake up in the middle of the night with so much anxiety that I wouldn’t fall back asleep. I cried so hard on christmas eve I had to skip my neighbors’ party because I couldn’t pull myself together. I lost weight, my eyes were puffy 24/7, & there were times I didn’t leave my couch for days because I barely had enough energy to even get up to use the bathroom. I felt nauseous every moment of every day & nothing was helping. I was sooo sad. the saddest i’ve been in my adult life.
there was a small part of me that secretly wanted him to drive to my house, knock on my front door, & apologize. beg me to come back with a bouquet of roses in his arms. cry to me & tell me I was the one just like he did the year before. but the thing is, regardless of how bad I wanted to go back, I couldn’t. I didn’t belong there anymore. & I knew that. even if that dumb fantasy played out, I wouldn’t let him back in. there isn’t anything for me in him anymore. what he did was unforgivable. it didn’t matter how sad I was—I just needed to be sad. whenever I had been sad about him before, I would text or call him or he would text or call me & we would make up & make it “better”. the cycle would continue. but I couldn’t do that this time. sometimes you have to take a shot of really horrible medicine in order to feel better & sometimes that shot of really horrible medicine is feeling every emotion as it comes & not letting yourself do the little things you know will make you feel better, but will only keep you sick. don’t let the cycle continue
8. you actually don’t need closure
I used to hear this & call bullshit (I still have moments, tbh). of course I need closure! I need to know every detail of why they acted the way they did because I need to be able to come to a complete resolution with myself over the entire situation & analyze it & re-analyze it & pick it apart & dissect it & analyze it again a few more times. I need to call him & SCREAM at him & wait for his response & force him to apologize.
but it’s not true. you don’t need closure. you need to heal, not closure. you don’t need to see them suffer like they made you suffer. their biggest punishment is who they are.
do you want to know what your closure is? noticing patterns & believing them. acceptance. & moving forward in a different direction. that’s your closure. after we broke up the first time, my ex immediately cared more for me. loved me better. said everything everyone wants to hear. every time I pulled away, he would notice & pull me back in. & while the feeling of being wanted feels good, it hurts when they care too late. it hurts when they only care when you start to care less. I felt like home to him & he would get homesick. it was a pattern. he did the bare minimum to keep me. my closure was accepting I was okay with that. that’s on me. I don’t need to know why he did it, I need to never end up in that situation again.
9. you won’t care forever
i used to lay in bed with anxiety & ask myself the worst question of all: what if I still miss him in a year? it would keep me up at night. but guess what! I don’t. I don’t miss him. whenever you ask yourself that question, what if I still miss them in a year?, immediately follow it up with “BESTIE, WHAT IF YOU DON’T!!”. the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself!!!!!!
during my last phone conversation with him, we were talking about how a piece of ourselves will always love each other & I am here, 11 months & 19 days later, to tell you that there isn’t. there isn’t a piece of me that misses him & there isn’t a piece of me that loves him. & maybe someday i’ll be able to look back on those five years of my life & find love for him, but the more I find out & the more I reflect, the more I catch myself thinking “gross, I don’t like that, thank God I was set free”.
he used to be everything to me, y’all. everything. I can’t emphasize it enough.
& now he’s next to nothing.
10. & most importantly: sometimes, you need to see it through. & that’s okay. & you’ll be okay.
i can tell you over and over and over and over to leave the situation. I can point everything wrong out to you. I can tell you in simple terms that you deserve more than what someone is giving you. but I know you won't leave until you are ready. & that’s okay. & it’s okay if it takes a long time. it took me a long time & I wasn’t ultimately the one to really end it. but I hope that one day you wake up and realize this isn't what you want to feel like anymore & decide you’re done.
you cannot force change, you feel it. no amount of advice will make you leave until you decide you no longer want to be in pain. one day, you wake up and the weight will be a little heavier and those extra few ounces will break the levee. the cycle will start to break & the fear will be gone. & just like that, you will be done. your moment will come
moving forward—i will not treat anyone how they’ve treated me because that is not who I am. no revenge because I am not vengeful. no revenge because they aren’t worth the energy. no revenge because my peace is more important than fueling my rage. did I think about driving to his house & smashing the funko pop my mom got him for Christmas & leave the broken plastic pieces on his desk? yes…but did i? no. a failed relationship isn’t a reflection of my ability to love someone & I’m not going to let someone’s emotional immaturity make me do things that are emotionally immature. I will not let this convince me that love isn’t real or not worth it or ever wasted.
I know I said you think you’re being patient until you learn you’re wasting your time, but the truth is I don’t really believe in wasting time. I do think I could’ve spent those years of my life in a more productive manner, perhaps loving someone better suited for me, but I learned a lot & I made a lot of friends & memories & experienced a lot of goodness. it wasn’t all bad. everything & everyone happens for a reason & if it & they don’t, it’s my nature to come up with a reason anyway.
someone asked me if I could go back, would I do it all again. I think in this moment & thought that moment it’s a dumb question. they’re not dumb for asking it—I think it’s a means to connect—but I’m not going to think about it. I can’t go back. I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. so I won’t think about it. I won’t entertain it.
if I leave you with anything, let it be this: you will always be yours, you will always have you, please choose yourself. love yourself & love yourself back.
these are the lessons I learned the hard way, but I learned them nonetheless!
love you, bye!
*note from the author
I wrote this whole thing & felt like a big piece of it was missing, but for a while I couldn’t tell what. It didn’t feel complete. but as the days leading up to today started creeping up on me & the melancholy & nostalgia bled into my routine…I think I figured out what it is.
I’ve been in love either two or three times in my life depending on what your definition of love is. the most recent time felt all-encompassing. again, I always loved him
from the shape of his name when his texts would appear on my homescreen to the entire shape of him, everything about my ex was familiar to me. the sound of his voice, the sound his car door made when he shut it, the sound his keys made as they hit each other as he’d unlock my front door with his own key. I’m sure I could drive to his house from my old apartment with my eyes closed without rolling a single stop sign. I loved the way his chin was just high enough to rest on my head when we hugged (always twice, one with him wrapping his arms around my shoulders, and then again with his arms around my waist), I loved that we felt like puzzle pieces fitting perfectly together, & I loved how he looked at me.
I often crave alonetime—yet he was the first and only person I’ve ever known that didn’t drain my social battery. I could spend days on end with him & not feel an ounce of introversion. that felt meaningful to me—his soul fit into mine. I couldn’t always remember where I ended & he began. there were pieces of him in everything & everywhere.
there’s endless evidence of how much i loved him on this instagram account alone because I loved him when I started it. there’s a photo of him in Everyday Feelings Installment 1, he contributed to Installment 8, he took the photo on the cover of Installment 9, & he’s the cover of both 12 & 13. & that’s not even including everything in each one that’s about him. I can try to erase him from my life, but his name will always be in each printed version & there are copies in 8+ states. he’s ½ of my twenties & neither of us can take that back.
I thought I found love & friendship in one person. Like God drew him up for me. I believed him when he said we were destined for each other, that God wanted us to be together. I saw sides of him no one else had & to be honest, I might still be the only person to have seen those bits of him he so very rarely lets out.
to be honest, a part of me thought I’d fallen in love for the last time.
a few months after we broke up, a family friend asked me about my boyfriend. I told him we broke up. his face dropped, he grabbed my hand, & said “oh my God, Elizabeth, i’m so sorry. I know he was your best friend. I can’t imagine what you’re feeling”.
a wave of sadness & nostalgia crashed over me & all I could say was “yeah…he was”.