Heartbreaks

I am not foreign to them. I have been on the receiving end of many, and the cause of a few.

I was fifteen when my heart was first shattered. I was in Ohio babysitting one summer and was very happily smitten with a senior that I met mid way through my freshman year. It was mid-August and the eighteenth birthday of Jason Perry, the best guy I had known thus far in my young life. I wanted to call him, but was driven to my brother’s house where I found my Mother and her boyfriend at the time who had come up from Kentucky. I was given the news that he had been killed in a car accident three days prior. I cried hysterically for hours and then experienced something I had only read about in teen romance books at that time. I had no more tears. I couldn’t cry anymore but had never felt more empty. This was the first I had ever known of grief and I didn’t think I would ever recover from it.

I was a senior in high school before I dated again. I was convinced then I wouldn’t ever date anyone else when I met him. Jeffery Wayne was who I was certain he would be my forever guy. We were together for years. And for the most part, everything about that relationship was bliss, until it wasn’t. We got engaged. We loved hard. We would also fight hard. I hurt to this day knowing how much we hurt each other by the end. My heart was broken not just because I was hurt in some arguments, but because in the end I wasn’t a person who he could have loved anymore. I wasn’t even a person I liked then. Thankfully, time heals all wounds and I’m proud to hear his stories of his life now, his marriage, his kiddo. He’s my pal. I can be proud of that.

Then there was the one ridiculous, insane, blinding relationship in my twenties. The decade where so many important lessons are learned. We’ll call him Shane. The guy that took my heart and ran over it, repeatedly. He was almost twelve years older than me and I thought he was the best thing that ever happened to the planet, let alone me. I was the relationship he had after he divorced. He had been single for a long time, so I thought his heart was healed and could be filled again. I was wrong. To this day, I can hear his response of, “I know you do” to my first “I love you.” He took me to the ocean, for the first time, when I was twenty-three. I was sure he planned this trip to tell me he loved me too. He didn’t. He is a fantastic physical therapist now. He moved away to get his degree. I offered to move with him. He didn’t want that, he needed to focus on school, there wouldn’t be anyone else, and he’d come back every weekend to see me. And every weekend, I’d get dressed up and wait for a call that never came. Years later I saw his wedding announcement in the paper. I was so upset I left work early. To this day that relationship is the only one where I didn’t do anything wrong. I gave him more of myself than I thought I could give anyone. I didn’t know why it wasn’t enough. And I continued not to know why I wasn’t enough for him, until I met his son. The son he could’ve only had with her.

Paul was the guy I wanted to feel everything for and couldn’t. I had no doubts then, or even now, that he would have treated me like royalty. He was my favorite guy to watch sports with, to argue my love of the Reds against his love of the Cubs with, to travel with, to go to concerts with….he was my friend. And I would sit across from him and watch him look at me in the exact way every girl wants a guy to look at her, and I’d feel uncomfortable. He was the guy I wish I could have given everything to, but sadly I couldn’t give him anything but friendship. Sadder still, that friendship has gone by the wayside after his move back to his hometown.

And then we have relationships that happen to us to complete a family, but not necessarily each other. Cory came into my life when my oldest was three. He has been her dad since then. Together we had another daughter. It was the only relationship I have every have where it wasn’t that I screwed him over and he didn’t do anything bad to me either. We just outgrew one another in that “romantic” regard. As weird as it sounds, without our kids, it would be hard to remember us being in a romantic relationship of any kind. He’s like my unbiological brother. He’s my good friend, he’s my husband’s pal, and he is a world class dad. He completed a family I wanted, in a way I didn’t realize I needed.

When I got married I reached out to people I dated and apologized. I said I was sorry for leading on some people that thought they had a future with me when I knew there wasn’t really anything there. I told others I was sorry for not being able to give them the real version of me when I was with them….because the truth was I had no clue who I was for a long time, even when I thought I did. There were other relationships that ended before they could start. Many unspoken feelings for those people we wish we could have had closure from.

The list of relationships I have found myself in, is longer than I’d ever expected or wanted it to be. But I guess life works itself out in the time frame God has for us, not the one we have made for ourselves. I don’t regret an ounce of this twisted journey I have been on. If I’d made one decision differently, I wouldn’t have finally figured out who I was. I wouldn’t have the three greatest loves of my life to share my home with. So for those people, each of them, I am forever grateful.