The one piece of break-up advice that has always helped me through
When your heart feels like it will never piece together again
It was February, so close to Valentine’s day, red balloons and trays of chocolate out in the supermarket aisles, an empty shorthand of romance. So cold the frost stuck to the windscreen of my car, indifferent to the gallons of de-icer being poured over it. Not a flicker of spring waiting in the wings.
My sister and I were in a wine bar in Brighton, seated at a low-lying wooden table, nursing glasses of a richly red Malbec. I was tired and exhausted from months, years of trying to support my late husband Rob through his addiction recovery.
While Rob was visiting friends somewhere up north, I had driven from London to be with my sister. Her place had become a haven for me, a respite. Somewhere I could go when my worries about Rob gathered like storm clouds and threatened to break over my life and wash it away.
He said the trip was: to take a break from London and ‘clear his head’. I knew from countless other similar trips that it was likely Rob had relapsed and was trying to hide his withdrawal from me, either by holing up at a friend’s place or a hotel. He was adamant this wasn’t the case. He’d promised truth and sobriety, hadn’t he? Of course he was taking his recovery seriously and hadn’t he just picked up his six months clean chip from Narcotics Anonymous?
But deep down, I knew he had. And I knew that things couldn’t continue as they had been. It wasn’t that he’d relapsed, it was the lying, the chaos my life had become, the misery that had tunnelled and made a home of me. When he’d confirm, the next day, that he had relapsed and lied, I would ask for a separation. Time to think about what I needed and whether our relationship had a future.
My sister, curled protectively around me, had spent many months listening to my worries, holding space while I off-loaded, not once saying ‘you should leave him.’ And even now, she didn’t say those words. But she did say something that got me through the darkest parts of my separation with Rob, the horror of his death which then made something like a separation seem laughably small. It is something I have held onto over the years, and especially recently in the last few years, when I’ve broken up with two people I thought I had a future with, and both of whom I loved in different ways.
It is something I wished I’d had especially during my 20s, when people broke up with me and I sat there holding the pieces of a broken heart, wondering if I would ever feel okay again. A flicker of worry whether there was something fundamentally unloveable about me.
“This is going to be hard for you to hear, and maybe it doesn’t even make sense right now,” my sister said, her eyes filled with love and concern.
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